Author Identifier
Martin Jones: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6463-3574
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Journal of Rural Health
Publisher
Wiley
School
School of Nursing and Midwifery
RAS ID
75886
Abstract
Purpose: In Australia, there is limited research regarding the effect of rurality on health care utilization using longitudinal data. Methods: We analyzed data from four annual waves (2009, 2013, 2017, and 2021) of the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to examine changes in the health care utilization over time among urban and rural residents. Poisson regression models estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for rural versus urban residents, accounting for a range of health-related and sociodemographic characteristics. Health care utilization was measured using four key indicators: visits to family doctor or another general practitioner (GP visits from hereon), hospital admissions, total nights' stay in the hospital, and prescribed medications taken on a regular basis. Results: The aIRR for GP visits among rural versus urban Australian residents increased over time, from 0.89 (95% CI: 0.82 to 0.97) in 2009 to 0.96 (95% CI: 0.89 to 1.04) in 2021 although not consistently increased in a statistically significant manner. While there were no consistent temporal patterns, our analysis found that rural residents experienced higher number of hospital admissions (aIRR, 1.12 to 1.15) and number of nights in the hospital in the last 12 months (aIRR, 1.18 to 1.25) compared to urban residents. Moreover, rurality had little to no effect on the number of prescribed medications taken on a regualar basis in the 12 months preceding the HILDA Surveys in 2013, 2017, and 2021. Conclusions: This study found that GP visits were less frequent among rural residents compared to metropolitan residents in 2009, indicating health care access disparities between rural and urban areas in Australia. However, the differences in GP visits between rural and urban areas were less pronounced from 2013 to 2021.
DOI
10.1111/jrh.12884
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Yisma, E., Jones, M., Pauh, L. S., Walsh, S., Jones, S., May, E., & Gillam, M. Impact of rurality on health care utilization among Australian residents from 2009 to 2021. The Journal of Rural Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jrh.12884