Rural Health

In medicine, rural health or rural medicine is the interdisciplinary study of health and health care delivery in the context of a rural environment or location. Some of the fields of study comprising rural health include: health, geography, midwifery, nursing, sociology, economics, and telehealth/telemedicine.

The term "rural" can be defined in many ways, such as by population density, by geographic location or other factors. Due to the large number of choices in the definition parties may often disagree with one another on which definition to use.

Rural Health definitions can be different for establishing underserved areas or health care accessibility in rural areas of the United States. According to the handbook, Definitions of Rural: A Handbook for Health Policy Makers and Researchers, “Residents of metropolitan counties are generally thought to have easy access to the relatively concentrated health services of the county’s central areas. However, some metropolitan counties are so large that they contain small towns and rural, sparsely populated areas that are isolated from these central clusters and their corresponding health services by physical barriers.” To address this type of rural area, “Harold Goldsmith, Dena Puskin, and Dianne Stiles (1992) described a methodology to identify small towns and rural areas within large metropolitan counties (LMCs) that were isolated from central areas by distance or other physical features.” This became the Goldsmith Modification definition of rural. “The Goldsmith Modification has been useful for expanding the eligibility for federal programs that assist rural populations—to include the isolated rural populations of large metropolitan counties.”