Communicating across rural and metropolitan health care settings

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it provides you with an understanding of what rurality means in the context of the Australian healthcare system. Second, it highlights, via practical examples, some of the main communication issues relating to patient safety faced by rural health service providers and patients. One of the main communication issues is the coordination of care across long distances. Coordination of care across long distances involves different types of facilities and health professionals having to share information. Coordination of care across long distances is necessary because rural patients access a variety of services, and these services need not be co-located. For this reason, services need to network about care delivery: communicate with one another about how to deliver care to rural patients in ways that create continuity and maintain access.