How to Improve Rural Health Care

Part 1 

Rural health and prenatal/maternity care has influences toward the patients. Rural areas have minimal facilities to offer adequate services to the numerous pregnant women, especially those situated away from urban areas. This leads various rural healthcare institutions to raise concerning safety due to the insufficient health resources, especially when it comes to providing prenatal/maternity care. They fail to offer adequate family-physician privileges, such as the ones attributed to maternity care. These forces continue presenting unending challenges to pregnant women residing in rural areas together with their families and the healthcare professionals. Here, the women are forced to travel long distances for prenatal/maternity services, which affects the capacity of the healthcare providers to assure safe delivery (Kozhimannil, 2014) . In this sense, rural areas face challenges when it comes to delivering adequate care services mostly due to absence of qualified staff and insufficient resources for offering effective prenatal/maternity care.

Comparing the U.S., and Canada, the U.S. is seeing a considerable decline in maternal care across rural areas with just about 6 percent service providers operating while over 46 percent of the population of the country resides in rural America. The challenges in accessing maternal services among women in rural America has contributed to significantly high levels of maternal mortality with the underlying forces being diabetes and hypertension together with poor geographical access prenatal care (Maron, 2017) . Canada also portrays a similar situation with the U.S. with a major erosion of maternity services in the rural areas of Canada. Rural areas have witnessed closures of maternal service institutions owing to challenges in hiring maternity care professions. Concerns also prevail on matters related to poor quality care and regionalization of rural services, which prevail across the entire country (Sutherns & Bourgeault, 2015) . Hence, receiving prenatal/maternity care in the U.S. or Canada continues presenting challenges, particularly due to the closing down of various institutions offering such services.

Part 2 

Various differences prevail, between obtaining prenatal/maternity care in rural areas within the U.S. and in urban areas. For the rural areas, for instance, they feature an insignificant number of institutions that provide such services. Most people are forced to travel long distances in search for maternity services (Borkowski, 2018) . Additionally, the rural areas have limited professionals to deal with prenatal/maternity care. For the urban areas, on the other hand, they have diverse healthcare facilities that provide prenatal/maternity care services together with having qualified professionals to handle the roles (Maron, 2017) . Furthermore, mothers do not have to travel long distances to seek prenatal/maternity services due to ease of accessing healthcare facilities that provide the services.

For families in rural and urban areas, they feature certain similarities and differences. The major similarity is that they have the opportunity of accessing healthcare services in any institution that they prefer without facing discrimination. However, key differences exist whereby the families in rural areas receive minimal healthcare services as opposed to the ones in urban areas (Borkowski, 2018) . Additionally, families in rural areas face challenges in finding professionals whereas urban areas feature numerous professionals in diverse fields of care.

In an effort to benefit the rural maternal health issues, the U.S. has the 2017 Maternal Health Accountability Act, which focuses on the health issues affecting pregnant women to prevent incidences of maternal mortality. It also focuses on identifying areas that feature professional shortage in an effort to ensure that they gain access to maternity healthcare professionals. Here, with the deteriorating maternal healthcare in rural areas, one approach of addressing the issue would be to make sure that the healthcare institutions in the areas are equipped with professionals who would handle maternity related cases (Borkowski, 2018) . The healthcare institutions should also be equipped with the necessary resources and equipment to facilitate prenatal/maternity services.

References

Borkowski, L. (2018). Improving maternal health in the US requires better policies and less racism. Retrieved from http://www.thepumphandle.org/2018/05/13/improving-maternal-health-in-the-us-requires-better-policies-and-less-racism/

Kozhimannil, K. (2014). Rural-urban differences in childbirth care, 2002-2010, and implications for the future. Med Care, 52 (1), 4-9.

Maron, D. F. (2017). Maternal health care Is disappearing in rural America. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/maternal-health-care-is-disappearing-in-rural-america/

Sutherns, R., & Bourgeault, I. L. (2015). Accessing maternity care in rural Canada: There's more to the story than distance to a doctor. Health Care for Women International, 29 (8), 863-883.