Smaller rural areas may be missing out on vital healthcare provision as they are overlooked in broader statistics, according to a report from the Local Government Association (LGA).
Rural areas take up 85% of English land, housing 19% of the population – these areas include open countryside with small towns and villages, coastal communities, former mining areas and commuter villages.
The LGA reports young people are gravitating to more urban conurbations, meaning the average age of rural residents is increasingly elderly, bringing with it a new healthcare landscape for providers to consider.
A main worry for the LGA is how, while ‘rural’ areas are generally healthier than urban ones statistically, data often overlooks particularly small areas whose unique individual problems then go unknowingly ignored by the NHS Trusts overseeing their provision.
Chair of the LGA community wellbeing board Cllr Izzi Seccombe said: ‘We don’t know enough about the health of people living in remote farming areas, in the small market towns and in the coastal villages that make up much of what we think of as the countryside.
‘These are very diverse environments which cannot all be lumped together for analysis or understood together as a whole. Although many rural areas are, in general, affluent, even wealthy in some cases, this is not true of all rural areas – the north/south divide can be seen in the countryside as well as in cities. And within even the most affluent areas, there can be real hardship, deprivation, ill health and inequalities.’
Concerns highlighted by the LGA, alongside Public Health England, include greater distance between rural residences and their nearest GPs, dentists and hospitals. The lower quality of phone and broadband signal also means rural areas may struggle to communicate with healthcare providers.
The LGA also highlighted the threat of exclusion coming from increasingly scarce public transport connections, as well as growing pollution moving into greener areas and rising house prices and fuel poverty in rural England.
Rather than presenting outright solutions, the report puts forward a series of ‘questions’ for healthcare providers to consider as they re-think their approach to providing healthcare in the country’s more remote areas.
Key themes in these questions include childcare provision, use of small area-based data, providing alternative means of accessing services, utilising existing rural networks, reducing the need to travel and reducing social isolation.