In Australia, we are fortunate that the Department of Health and Ageing has implemented the Rural Health Strategy which has provided funding to Universities for the establishment of Rural Clinical Schools. This strategy was designed to encourage medical students to take up a career in rural practice by enabling them to undertake extended clinical training placements in rural locations. When the...

This article discusses the danger of a growing digital divide between rural and other areas. It presents broadband as increasingly necessary for the delivery of information, health, education, business, social security, public and leisure services. Access to broadband has become vital for rural communities to participate in a progressively digital economy and to overcome problems of physical an...

A significant proportion of people live and work in rural areas, and rural mental health is important wherever psychiatry is practised. There are inherent difficulties in conducting rural research, due in part to the lack of an agreed definition of rurality. Mental health is probably better in rural areas, with the exception of suicide, which remains highest in male rural residents. A number of...

While a dairy cooperative provided the bylaws, managing a cooperative of rural hospitals has been a learn-as-you-go experience. This article presents the management principles that have been learned over the last 13 years. Its experience suggests that developing and managing partnerships requires behaviors different from those typically associated with the management of individual organizations.

INTRODUCTION 'Belonging' is a universal characteristic of human beings and is a basic human need. Rural nurses describe the nature of their practice as being embedded in working as a team where belonging is central to the success of the team and the individual nurse. As a result they form close professional and personal ties. The challenge for nursing students is to develop a sense of belonging...

The purpose of this study is to identify barriers to the adoption of new technology in rural settings. Specifically, this paper focuses on identifying and overcoming barriers to the adoption of a medication error reporting system in eight rural hospitals. Prior research has generally focused on barriers to the adoption of new technology in urban areas, medical centers, or large hospitals. The l...

The paper discusses the institutional reforms for rural electrification (RE) in Thailand and Bangladesh and analyses the impacts of private sector participation in electricity generation and tariff reforms on the poor in Thailand. RE program in Thailand, initiated in 1977, increased electricity access by rural households from 7% in early 70s to 97% by 2000. In Bangladesh the RE program, initiat...

Socioeconomic trends and developments within the U.S. healthcare system have challenged rural hospitals' ability to maintain adequate operating margins and offer needed services. However, some hospitals have fared better in this negative environment than have others. To clarify factors that distinguish the most viable rural Catholic hospitals from the least viable, our study identified a group ...

The New South Wales Department of Health (NSW Health) wishes to make appropriate use of casemix data as inputs to the determination of funding levels for small rural hospitals. However, other factors such as hospital size and degree of isolation might need to be taken into account. The study reported here involved correlation of actual expenditures with those predicted by use of a casemix model...

BACKGROUND Although controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the sensitivity of allergenic pollen production to future climatic change (ie, increased CO(2) and temperature), no in situ data are available. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this investigation was to assess, under realistic conditions, the impact of climatic change on pollen production of common ragweed, a ubi...