Our Health In Our Hands: Building Effective Community Partnerships For Rural Health Service Provision

Multi‐level rural community engagement in health

“…Outcomes were a jointly organised ambulance service and a well-being centre that met locally identified needs and drew on community and government resources. 23 Community engagement processes can become 'governmentalised' 32 when rural health professionals, who set local engagement agendas, tend to adopt an instrumental approach to engagement, wanting consumers to engage around their own agenda without considering the nature of the community, yet the evidence from the literature presented here suggests that rural health consumers are more likely to engage in a system that matches their needs and values. 10 Further, it is reasonable to expect that better health outcomes will flow from a system that matches health needs.…”

“…Understanding: (i) facilitates alignment between health programs and community expectations, customs, values and norms; (ii) assists in identifying and incorporating relevant community assets, including social capital, skills and local organisational contexts; and (iii) provides information about health needs and priorities. 10,23,31 In two Tasmanian rural communities facility managers comfortable and skilled in working with community and health bureaucracy engendered trusting relationships and altered expectations of both. Outcomes were a jointly organised ambulance service and a well-being centre that met locally identified needs and drew on community and government resources.…”

“…22 Effective partnerships produce a sense of community ownership of the health service as a rural community hub, bringing together physical, human and social capital resources. 23 The degree to which a partnership demonstrates each of the above indicators can be used to assess community-service partnership effectiveness, but doesn't tell us how to go about the process of engagement. World Health Organization and Canada have toolkits for building community participation in health, 2,24 and Australia has generic participation toolkits.…”

Mobile skilled workers: Making the most of an untapped rural community resource

“…many people indicate that they have both kinds of reasons for volunteering (p. 157). The literature also indicates that for some mobile workers, such as police, health professionals and teachers, community involvement was linked to, and seen as an extension of, their professional roles (Johns et al, 2007;Farmer and Kilpatrick, 2009;Kilpatrick et al, 2009). …”

Community participation in rural health: a scoping review

“…In Australia, community participation in rural areas is described as an important strategy to build self reliant and self determined communities, and in health policy terms, is viewed as central in developing locally, responsive healthcare that is based on rigorous population health needs assessment [10,31]. Researchers note the long tradition of rural community participation in Australian health services [35], that many communities demand involvement [22], and that the sustainability of rural health services is viewed as central to the sustainability of towns [36]. Kilpatrick [22] suggests, however, that there is a wealth of community participation in rural health service planning that is never reported and that given policy imperatives for higher level community engagement, there is an urgent need to capture examples and commit to ‘analysing the processes of community engagement in order to improve them’ [32].…”