Learning from Rural Health Innovation

Abstract

You know that you're Canadian (or, presumably, Australian, Russian or Brazilian) if you measure distance in hours, not miles, or so the saying goes. The vast distances in sparsely populated landscapes represent substantial challenges for the effective delivery of high-quality care. Resources, specialized care and connections that are readily available in urban areas are in short supply. But kayaks, snowmobiles and canola are by no means the only innovations to be inspired by the needs of rural Canada. Many creative solutions to healthcare challenges have also emerged beyond big cities. New models of team-based collaborative care, expanded scopes of practice and imaginative uses of telehealth technology to deliver specialized care are just a few examples. There are rich opportunities for sharing innovations and spreading best practices from community to community. Over time, a number of these innovations have also influenced care in urban settings. For instance, telehealth, once seen as a tool to be used in remote areas, is increasingly common in communities of all sizes, sharing specialized expertise between city-centre hospitals, helping those who are homebound to get the care that they need and more. This issue of Healthcare Policy/Politiques de Sante has a number of papers that focus on health in rural settings, but their findings are relevant in a range of contexts and challenges – access to care, appropriate program planning and effective health human resources management. Other papers are also broad-based, with findings that can be applied across a number of settings. Michael Law discusses the implications of approaches to generic drug pricing; Clare Liddy and colleagues address practice facilitation programs and Mohammed Al-Hamdani presents the results of new research into plain packaging for cigarettes, to name just a few. I hope that you will find much food for thought, as well as inspiration for policy and practice improvement, in the journal's pages.