User:Eowoyele/Rural health

Access to Healthcare (part of the section)
Rural areas, especially in Africa, have greater difficulties in recruiting and retaining qualified and skilled professionals in the healthcare field. In Sub-Saharan Africa, urban and more prosperous areas have disproportionately more of the countries’ skilled healthcare workers. For example, urban Zambia has 20 times more doctors and over five times more nurses and midwives than the rural areas. In Malawi, 87% of its population lives in rural areas, but 96.6% of doctors are found in urban health facilities. Burkina Faso has one midwife per 8,000 inhabitants in richer zones, and one per nearly 430,000 inhabitants in the poorest zone. In South Africa alone, half of their population lives in rural areas, but only 12% of doctors actually practice there. This is similar to the realities in Ghana. One solution has been to develop programs designed to train women to perform home-based health care for patients in Rural Africa. One such program is African Solutions to African Problems (ASAP).

Physical environment
In many countries a lack of critical infrastructure and development in rural areas can impair rural health. Insufficient wastewater treatment, lack of paved roads, and exposure to agricultural chemicals have been identified as additional environmental concerns for those living in rural locations. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports lower water quality and increased crowding of households as factors affecting disease control in rural and remote locations.

Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) (portion of the section)
Rural health improvement projects worldwide tend to focus on finding solutions to the three basic problems associated with a rural health system. These problems center around communication, transportation of services and goods, and lack of doctors, nurses, and general staff.

Many rural health projects in poor areas that lack access to basic medical help like clinics or doctors use non-traditional methods for providing health care. Approaches like Hesperian Health Guides' book, Where There is No Doctor, and World Hope International's app, mBody Health, have been shown to increase health awareness and provide additional health resources to rural communities.

An evaluation of a community organizing, mother and infant health program called the Sure Start project in rural India showed that community organization around maternal and infant health improvement leads to actual improvement in the health of the mother. The evaluation also showed that these community based programs lead to increased use of health services by the mothers.

In the United States, the Health Resources and Services Administration funds the Rural Hospital Performance Improvement Project to improve the quality of care for hospitals with fewer than 200 beds. Eula Hall founded the Mud Creek Clinic in Grethel, Kentucky to provide free and reduced-priced healthcare to residents of Appalachia. In Indiana, St. Vincent Health implemented the Rural and Urban Access to Health to enhance access to care for under-served populations, including Hispanic migrant workers. As of December 2012, the program had facilitated more than 78,000 referrals to care and enabled the distribution of US $43.7 million worth of free or reduced-cost prescription drugs. Owing to the challenges of providing rural healthcare services worldwide, the non-profit group [Remote Area Medical] began as an effort to provide care in third-world nations but now provide services primarily in the US.

Access to Healthcare Addition
In recent years, physicians from sub-Saharan Africa have left the continent in droves. The global labor market has prompted more than 30% of physicians trained in this region to migrate to higher-income countries. It is often hard for those in rural communities to travel to clinics and hospitals for care. It is not an common practice to seek alternatives which include traditional and allopathic forms of medicine for healing.

Ghana implemented the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) program which is designed to deliver to care packages, in addition to providing them with physician care. The initiative has face problems in part due to the uneven distribution of healthcare professionals across all communities. There are community districts that are overstaffed, while others in rural districts are severely understaffed or lack formal clinic setups.

Physical Environment Addition
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In many countries a lack of critical infrastructure and development in rural areas can impair rural health. The physical isolation of some rural communities coupled with the lack of infrastructure makes it increasingly difficult for those that live in these regions to travel to seek care in clinics and hospitals. Insufficient wastewater treatment, lack of paved roads, and exposure to agricultural chemicals have been identified as additional environmental concerns for those living in rural locations. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports lower water quality and increased crowding of households as factors affecting disease control in rural and remote locations.

Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Addition
In 2002, NGOs “provided 40 percent of clinical care needs, 27 percent of hospital beds and 35 percent of outpatient services”  for people in Ghana. The conditions of of the Ghanaian Healthcare system was dire during the early 80s, due to a lack of supplies and trained healthcare professionals. Structural adjustment policies caused the cost of health services to rise significantly. NGOs are rebalancing the brain drain that remaining healthcare professionals feel, as well as provide human capital to provide necessary health services to the Ghanaian people.