page_title: Rural health
hierarchical_section_title: Rural health
caption_attribution_description: Village elders participate in a training for rural health care workers in Ethiopia. Photo Credit: S. Kalscheur/USAID.
context_page_description: In medicine, rural health or rural medicine is the interdisciplinary study of health and health care delivery in rural environments. The concept of rural health incorporates many fields, including geography, midwifery, nursing, sociology, economics, and telehealth or telemedicine.
  Research shows that the healthcare needs of individuals living in rural areas are different from those in urban areas, and rural areas often suffer from a lack of access to healthcare. These differences are the result of geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, workplace, and personal health factors. For example, many rural communities have a large proportion of elderly people and children. With relatively few people of working age, such communities have a high dependency ratio. People living in rural areas also tend to have poorer socioeconomic conditions, less education, higher rates of tobacco and alcohol use, and higher mortality rates when compared to their urban counterparts. There are also high rates of poverty among rural dwellers in many parts of the world, and poverty is one of the biggest social determinants of health.
context_section_description: In medicine, rural health or rural medicine is the interdisciplinary study of health and health care delivery in rural environments. The concept of rural health incorporates many fields, including geography, midwifery, nursing, sociology, economics, and telehealth or telemedicine.
  Research shows that the healthcare needs of individuals living in rural areas are different from those in urban areas, and rural areas often suffer from a lack of access to healthcare. These differences are the result of geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, workplace, and personal health factors. For example, many rural communities have a large proportion of elderly people and children. With relatively few people of working age (20–50 years of age), such communities have a high dependency ratio. People living in rural areas also tend to have poorer socioeconomic conditions, less education, higher rates of tobacco and alcohol use, and higher mortality rates when compared to their urban counterparts. There are also high rates of poverty among rural dwellers in many parts of the world, and poverty is one of the biggest social determinants of health.
  Many countries have made it a priority to increase funding for research on rural health. These efforts have led to the development of several research institutes with rural health mandates, including  the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research in Canada, Countryside Agency in the United Kingdom, the Institute of Rural Health in Australia, and the New Zealand Institute of Rural Health. These research efforts are designed to help identify the healthcare needs of rural communities and provide policy solutions to ensure those needs are met. The concept of incorporating the needs of rural communities into government services is sometimes referred to as rural proofing.
caption: Village elders participate in a training for rural health care workers in Ethiopia.
exif: {"Image SubfileType": "Full-resolution Image", "Image ImageWidth": "1800", "Image ImageLength": "1350", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "LZW", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot A80", "Image StripOffsets": "[20638, 101092, 184294, 276434, 363174, 425250, 499594, 583620, 754858, 945470, 1138476, 1342242, 1558312, 1774416, 1993334, 2186246, 2372746, 2560232, 2750006, 2935908, 3111666, 3288862, 3485390, 3703988, 3910972, 4127706, 4363814, 4605964, 4851020]", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image RowsPerStrip": "48", "Image StripByteCounts": "[80453, 83202, 92139, 86740, 62076, 74344, 84025, 171238, 190611, 193005, 203766, 216070, 216103, 218918, 192912, 186500, 187485, 189774, 185901, 175757, 177196, 196527, 218597, 206983, 216734, 236107, 242149, 245056, 30758]", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2005:03:21 15:11:38", "Image Predictor": "Horizontal differencing", "Image Tag 0x8649": "[]"}