Rural Health
Special Issue of Rural Society
Volume 20 Issue 3 December 2010
ii+110 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-79-2
Editors:
Lisa Bourke
University of Melbourne, VIC
Juli Coffin
Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health
Jeffrey Fuller
University of Sydney, NSW
Judy Taylor
University of South Australia, SA
Rural Society is a refereed journal published by eContent in association with the Institute of Land Water and Society and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University. Each year one issue is devoted to a particular theme - the 2010 themed issue will focus on rural health.
Rural health emerged in Australia as a response to its workforce crisis and findings that the health status of rural Australians was poorer than their urban counter-parts. Despite wide recognition of the social determinants, rural health is still very focused on increasing its workforce and improving access to health services. It has also identified that the dramatic statistics describing the health of Indigenous Australians in rural and particularly remote Australia is a major contributor to the poorer health status of rural and remote Australians, and therefore aims to improve the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. But has rural health as a discipline moved beyond this reactive response to the rural health crisis? Are workforce and health status the key issues in rural health? Furthermore, what do we really understand about rural health in Australia and other developed nations with similar rural sectors?
This Special Edition of Rural Society will focus upon these issues and discussions of rural health in Australia. Key questions include:
- Is access to quality health care possible in rural and remote Australia?
- What has been White Australia's commitment to, history of and strategies toward the health and wellbeing of Indigenous communities in rural and remote Australia in the past, and what can we learn for the future?
- What is the role of rural and Indigenous communities in the health, wellbeing and social care of their residents?
- Is rural health medically dominated or multidisciplinary, and how has this impacted the discipline's development?
- How can we make sense of the rural health crisis and the recent decade of policy responses?
- What is the role of health promotion in challenging cultural processes underpinning health in rural communities?
- Are the key discourses in rural health contributing to or addressing the workforce crisis?
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