A review and synthesis of strategies and policy recommendations on the rural health workforce

The objective of the entire project is to gain a deeper understanding of rural health human resources issues, develop a set of strategies to strengthen the health workforce in rural Ontario, and conduct a number of consultations and pilot tests. [...] For the sake of convenience and parsimony, only “rural” is used in the rest of this report and the term is employed in a broad sense to include remote, northern, isolated, and underserviced areas. [...] The synthesis was done by using content analysis and by analyzing the material according to several themes such as the nature of rural health workforce problems, severity of the problems, causes of the problems, what needs to be done to overcome the problems, etc. [...] Virtually all reports reviewed recognize the acute and persistent shortages of health care providers in rural and northern Ontario, as well as in many parts of rural Canada, and the never-ending struggle to attract and keep them in rural communities. [...] Similarly, the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (2002) has recognized the difficulties facing the rural health workforce and has made a series of recommendations to address these problems.