Rural health care: a rapid review of the impact of rurality on the costs of delivering health care.

The Nuffield Trust was commissioned by the National Centre for Rural Health and Care to explore the key issues around the impact of rurality and sparsity on the costs of delivering health care. The analysis suggests that while the association between rurality, overstretched services and financial pressure are unclear, NHS trusts with ' unavoidably small ' sites do appear to underperform: as well as having generally longer waiting times and lengths of stay, they are also in greater financial difficulty.
Source: Current Awareness Service for Health (CASH) - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news