Maternity services for rural and remote Australia: barriers to operationalising national policy

Jo Longman, Jude Kornelsen, Jen Pilcher, Sue Kildea, Sue Kruske, Stefan Grzybowski, Sarah Robin, Margaret Rolfe, Deborah Donoghue, Geoffrey G. Morgan and Lesley Barclay

Health Policy, 2017, vol. 121, issue 11, 1161-1168

Abstract: In Australia, many small birthing units have closed in recent years, correlating with adverse outcomes including a rise in the number of babies born before arrival to hospital. Concurrently, a raft of national policy and planning documents promote continued provision of rural and remote maternity services, articulating a strategic intent for services to provide responsive, woman-centred care as close as possible to a woman’s home. The aims of this paper are to contribute to an explanation of why this strategic intent is not realised, and to investigate the utility of an evidence based planning tool (the Toolkit) to assist with planning services to realise this intent.

Keywords: Rural health services; Maternity hospital; Health planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851017302403
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:121:y:2017:i:11:p:1161-1168

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2017.09.012

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().