Rurality predisposes departure from gold-standard care, leading to delayed or accelerated access to surgery: insights from a scoping review

Abstract

Background: Because tertiary centres are generally situated at urban sites, it is unclear whether patients in rural areas have the same access to surgical services that patients in urban areas do. We sought to map the North American evidence landscape of how rurality affects access to medically indicated surgeries and identify system-, patient-, and provider-level barriers that preclude urban-comparable care. Methods: We carried out a systematic search adhering to PRISMA for Scoping Reviews methodology across PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science, encompassing literature from the last 26 years (January 2023). Search terms included “rural population,” “health care access,” “surgical procedures,” and “health disparities.” We synthesized our findings using a narrative approach. Results: Of 13897 identified studies, we included 71 publications, spanning a wide spectrum of surgical disciplines. Of these, 83% reported diminished and 17% reported accelerated access to surgery, and 30% reported an interaction between rurality with other social determinants of health, particularly age, sex and gender, and race and ethnicity. Of the studies that reported diminished access, top cited reasons included primary and specialist provider density, differences in patients’ socioeconomic profiles, and provision of comparable counselling during surgical decision-making. Strikingly, a key driver of enhanced surgical access was an absence of specialized medical interventions leading to an overreliance on surgical alternatives. Conclusion: Whether surgical access was diminished or accelerated, the net impact of rurality was a deviation from guideline-concordant care. A key implication of these findings is that reliance on surgical wait times alone can skew perception of surgical access, advocating for adoption of integrated quality-of-care metrics that better reflect access to comprehensive medical and surgical treatment programs.