Rural health - overview

Impact of rurality on health status

Health outcomes, as exemplified by higher rates of death, tend to be poorer outside Major Cities. The main contributors to higher death rates in regional and remote areas are coronary heart disease, other circulatory diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (e.g. emphysema), motor vehicle accidents, diabetes, suicide, other injuries, and some cancers such as lung cancer. These higher death rates may relate to differences in access to services, risk factors and the regional/remote environment. 

There are clear differences in health service usage between areas. There are, for example, lower rates of some hospital surgical procedures, lower rates of GP consultation and generally higher rates of hospital admission in regional and remote areas than in Major Cities. There are also inter-regional differences in risk factors:  for example, people from regional and remote areas tend to be more likely than their Major Cities counterparts to smoke and drink alcohol in harmful or hazardous quantities. It is also likely that environmental issues such as more physically dangerous occupations and factors associated with driving (e.g. long distances, greater speed, isolation, animals on roads and so on) play a part in elevating accident rates and related injury death in country areas.

However, it is not currently possible to apportion the generally poorer health outcomes outside Major Cities to access, environment or risk factor issues. It is likely that each of these three play a part.   

Higher death rates and poorer health outcomes outside Major Cities, especially in remote areas, also reflects the higher proportions of the populations in those areas who are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Overall, death rates for Indigenous people tend to be much higher than for non-Indigenous people for a number of reasons (see detailed publication).

Data quality issues, the limited nature of available data-sets, poor identification of Indigenous people in data collections and differences between the operation of health systems in metropolitan and non metropolitan areas, can often make comparison difficult.

The Institute is currently working on a number of specific rural health reports to identify some of the questions we need to answer in order to inform policy development.

Work on rurality

Health in rural and remote Australia provides details of health status, risk factors and access for rural Australia.

Rural, regional and remote health: Information framework and indicators seeks to describe important rural health questions, assess the quality of data, and identify areas where data development is needed.

Rural, regional and remote health: A study on mortality systematically reviews deaths in major cities, regional and remote areas, trends, causes and the major contributors to higher death rates outside major cities.

Rural, regional and remote health: A study on mortality - Summary of findings condenses the findings of the study on mortality.

Rural, regional and remote health: A guide to remoteness classifications describes the three remoteness classifications RRMA, ARIA and ASGC Remoteness Areas.

These reports have been commissioned by The Office of Rural Health in the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing. The work has been advised by the Rural Health Information Advisory Committee - RHIAC.

Our current work aims to: 

• describe and compare the main geographical classifications (RRMA, ARIA and ASGC Remoteness)
• report against the health status, health determinants and health system performance indicators described in the Information framework and indicators report. 

For more rural health research published by AIHW click here.