Lack of Medical Resources in Rural Areas: Challenges and Solutions

Running head: UNCCC300
UNCCC300
Name of the Student
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Assessment 2
Open editorial- Lack of medical resources in rural areas
Australian health care has significantly improved in the last decade. However, the people
living in remote and rural areas are suffering more often with illness. The gap in the health care
is attributed to the lack of medical resources in the rural areas.
People in rural areas wait longer to see doctors, when compared to urban city
counterparts. As per the reports from the Council of Australian Governments reform council,
there is less incentives given to the medical specialists to move to the rural areas. In rural areas
there are only 135 doctors per 100,000, in compared to the 335 in the urban cities (Wakerman et
al., 2017).
People in rural areas have high prevalence of chronic diseases and they lack access to the
primary health care services such as general practioners who can treat patents on emergency
conditions. In addition to shortage of physicians, other healthcare professionals, other factors for
lack of medical resources are geographical barriers. There are less number of health care
facilities in rural areas and often provided limited services. It is because of extreme weather
conditions, and poor transportation. It increases the response time by the emergency medical
professionals as well as ambulatory services (Wakerman et al., 2017).
Economists and the investors mainly invest in the health care sectors in urban areas as it
is not highly profitable in rural areas. Therefore, there are primary health care services without
the lab technicians and pharmacists. On the other hand people in rural areas prefer to be treated
in the local environment, especially the Indigenous community. In addition, there is lack of
adequate funding and infrastructure to support the medical facilities in rural areas. Rural people

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also lack adequate Medicaid coverage. It contributes to inadequate supply of drugs, counselling
and screening services (Dawson, Nkowane & Whelan, 2015).
These stark findings brings into realisation that the principle of the common good is not
promoting the health equalities among people of rural areas. Common good refers to the social
well being of people that allows them to reach their fulfilment easily (Strömgren et al., 2016).
There is lack of shared responsibility in addressing this issue of common good. From the nursing
perspective, there is need of high attention considering the increasing mortality and morbidity in
rural areas due to chronic illness.
Nurses can help reduce the barriers to access the medical facilities in rural areas by
staying committed to health equity, beneficence and social justice. The nurses must be accounted
for the community needs and resources. It will help set priority and direct the limited medical
resources to the most important areas (Bradford et al., 2016). Nurses may collaborate with the
physician, governmental and non-governmental organisations to choose the right program and
policies for the rural communities. Nurse may implement the evidence based program to rural
medical care.
Nurses and other providers may bring change in the rural health care services by
focusing on the policy, systems and environmental programs for substantial improvement over
time. In this process the nurse may engage a variety of stakeholders including community
members and partners. Nurses may collaborate with urban health care centres to hold national
workshops for the policy makers to address the issue of the access, shortage of the medical
professionals, and improve the role of the communities in the designing the health care delivery
systems (Wakerman et al., 2017).

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To establish the health equity, the nurse may work with the Council of Australian
Governments reform council, to finance essential rural medical services. The providers may
highlight the government through social media pages and online surveys about the impact of
rural hospital closures for rural Medicare populations. The rural health care may collaborate
with different health care organisations to address barriers in delivering necessary vaccinations to
children. Increased focus on telehealth will help overcome the geographical barriers (Humphreys
et al., 2017).
Adopting the collaborative care model in academic medical centres, will help expand the
knowledge of the local providers. It will increase the linkage between the rural and urban
medical centres. Improving the funding will increase the medical care facilities (Roden et al.,
2015). It is distracting to lack stable funding. Moreover, many of the medical benefits and supply
of resources rely on grant funding as well as revenue from contracts.
Assessment 3
Description and Ways to address the challenge
In rural areas lack of medical resources is affecting the common good of people. It is the
global issue as across the world, there are many countries like America, Australia, and India
where rural areas lack adequate medical resources. This can be considered as factor that greatly
differentiates the developing and developed countries. Even in countries where the majority of
the population are living in the rural areas there is lack of the adequate medical resources for the
people suffering from chronic illnesses. These resources are mainly concentrated in big cities
(Roden et al., 2015). It can be said that the shared responsibility of the common good is lacking
in this matter.