Rural Health Systems Model

Back to Rural health care in Canada

Many factors affect health status, health needs, system use and health system performance in rural areas. The Rural Health Systems Model presents a set of key factors to help you better understand the unique characteristics of rural health systems, and identify the qualitative and quantitative information that can help you interpret the available evidence.

You can use the model to

• Explain what contributes to performance differences among rural communities
• Identify meaningful and appropriate peers, comparators and benchmarks
• Guide planning, decision-making and communication
• Improve health and health care in rural regions

When examining health system performance indicators and measures, rural health systems can often appear as outliers. They may also be excluded from reporting due to small sample sizes, or they may be aggregated with other, sometimes disparate regions. In addition, performance results can be highly variable over time, and while quantitative data tells us a lot, it’s not the whole story. Individual rural communities, regions and health systems can be very different from one another, making it difficult to understand or explain variations among rural regions.

On the surface — when we consider only population size and geographic distance — health systems in different rural areas can appear similar, but they may actually be quite different when you dig deeper. In addition, contextual factors related to the surrounding health system and community can also have a significant influence on health system performance and population needs. Finally, there may be important interactions among these factors.