Rural health disparities: The policy perspective

Abstract

This chapter describes three frameworks practitioners and students can use to address rural health disparities from a policy perspective. These frameworks can be considered across the policy continuum. Simply put, dependent on where you are on the issue of rural health disparities, you can interweave the role of policy based on the frameworks presented in this chapter. For example, this chapter begins with understanding, first there needs to be a political willingness to solve the issue of rural health disparities. Therefore, this chapter initially gives discourse on political will and describes political theories to establish political willingness for equitable health policies. What follows are evaluative models designed for the policy adoption and policy implementation phases. Finally, this chapter ends with discussions on how to sustain healthy public policies for rural communities to eliminate health disparities.