Patterns of health services utilization in rural Canada.

CONTEXT OF THIS STUDY: Canadians value ease of access to their health services. Although many studies have focused on accessibility to health services in Canada, few have examined rural-urban differences in this aspect, particularly from a national perspective. Yet disparities in access to health services exist between rural and urban populations, as do the challenges of delivering health care to more remote areas or to those with small populations.

Moving on? Predictors of intent to leave among rural and remote RNs in Canada.

Context: Examination of factors related to the retention or voluntary turnover of Registered Nurses (RNs) has mainly focused on urban, acute care settings.

Purpose: This paper explored predictors of intent to leave (ITL) a nursing position in all rural and remote practice settings in Canada. Based on the conceptual framework developed for this project, potential predictors of ITL were related to the individual RN worker, the workplace, the community context, and satisfaction related to both the workplace and the community(s) within which the RN lived and worked.

Rural net migration of Canada's rehabilitative and technical health care workers.

Recruitment and retention of health care providers continue to be problematic for rural Canada. Both imply movement from source to destination areas. But analyses of mobility patterns, especially to and from rural areas, do not exist for most of Canada's health care occupational groups.

Insights from a national study.

Aboriginal registered nurses have been identified as an essential group in the delivery of health services in First Nations communities. Despite this, there is a lack of information about this group of nurses in Canada. This article presents information about this group taken from two components of a national study, The Nature of Nursing Practice in Rural and Remote Canada: documentary analysis and a national survey of nurses.

Sources of data for rural health research: development of an inventory of Canadian databases.

Secondary data sources can often be used to help address questions about the health status, health behavior, health resources allocation, and utilization of health services of rural Canadians. But the task of deciding which Canadian databases are amenable to rural health research remains a challenge. As part of a larger research project titled "Canada's Rural Communities: Understanding Rural Health and Its Determinants," an inventory of 51 Canadian databases that have the potential of being used for rural health research was compiled, and it continues to be maintained and updated.