The Journal
Rural and Remote Health is a not-for-profit, open-access, online-only, peer-reviewed academic publication. It aims to further rural and remote health education, research and practice. The primary purpose of the Journal is to publish and so provide an international knowledge-base of peer-reviewed material from rural health practitioners (medical, nursing and allied health professionals and health workers), educators, researchers and policy makers.
The core business of the Journal is to:
- Support rural health by disseminating rural health information in published peer-reviewed articles and other information.
- Advantage our system to become self-supporting/independent.
- Raise the profile of rural and remote health academics.
The Journal is committed to the accessibility of scholarly information, operates ethically (with regard to humans and animals, authorship and conflicts of interest) and upholds the integrity of scientific enquiry and publication. The authors, reviewers, honorary editorial positions and staff form the human content of the Journal and are treated fairly and with respect. All editorial, review and governance positions are honorary.
All material except some invited articles (editorials and commentaries), regularly published non-research material or news items and standing matter is reviewed by authors’ academic peers.
The journal does not accept paid third-party advertising.
Bibliographic information
Rural and Remote Health is indexed by AMI, APAFT, APAIS, APAIS-Health, ATSIROM, CABI, CINAHL, Current Contents, DOAJ, EBSCOhost, EMBASE, Informit (Health Collection), ProQuest, PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Sherpa Romeo and Web of Science (SSCI, SCIE). The Journal is also recognised by the Australian Government's ERA.
ISSN: 1445-6354
Number of issues per year: 4
Impact factor: 2.0
RRH Governance
Emeritus Professor Paul Worley, Executive Director of Clinical Innovation at the Riverland Mallee Coorong Local Health Network, former Australian Rural Health Commissioner and former Dean of the School of Medicine at Flinders University, is the Editor-in-Chief of Rural and Remote Health. Paul is a practicing rural doctor and, as Editor, shapes and guides the journal, oversees the review process and supports and advises authors, taking an active interest in the progress of each article in production.
Amanda Barnard is Associate Dean, Rural Clinical School, Australian National University Medical School in Canberra, Australia. She works as a GP in Braidwood, a small rural town in south-east New South Wales. While her interests include rural medical education, interprofessional learning and health service delivery, she has a particular interest in the primary care management of respiratory illness.
MD Specialist in Public Health working in a local health service authority managing a health network that includes rural and isolated areas of Patagonia in Chile. He has experience as a consultant in Human Resources for Health for Ministry of Health and PAHO. He was in charge of the local Research Ethics Committee until March 2022 and currently leads the Regional Secretariat of Chilean Ministry of Health.
Professor Ian Couper is Director of the Ukwanda Centre for Rural Health and Professor of Rural Health at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. A trained family physician, he spent nine years practising in a remote rural hospital in northern KwaZuluNatal province, and then 16 years working in primary care and health service development in rural North West province. He held the first chair of rural health at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). He has chaired both the Rural Doctors Association of Southern Africa (RuDASA) and the Wonca Working Party on Rural Practice (WONCA Rural).
Bronwyn Fields is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at California State University Sacramento in Sacramento, California, USA. Dr. Fields' research interests include the health workforce, nurse recruitment and retention in rural areas, health disparities and international health and development. As a nurse and midwife, she has worked extensively in Australia, South East Asia and the Pacific, including consulting for the World Health Organization, Asian Development Bank, AusAID and other international organizations on health workforce development. More recently, Bronwyn has lived and worked in rural Northern California. She joined the Rural and Remote Health North America section as a Regional Editor in 2016.
Since 1995 Christos Lionis has worked at the University of Crete Medical School, where he is Professor and Director of the Clinic of Social and Family Medicine. With a passion for the importance and the value of Family Medicine, Christos is actively involved in the development of Primary Care and General Practice in Greece. He currently co-ordinates a thriving GP research network on rural Crete, and is also responsible for the supervision of a number of PhD students in the fields of quality management and the formulation of guidelines for management of common disease and chronic conditions, factors contributing to cardiovascular disease, gastroenterology, mental health and morbidity in general practice. Prior to his employment at the University of Crete, Christos worked for 9 years as Manager and Medical Director of Spili Health Centre, obtaining experience as a clinician and researcher in the field of Primary Health Care and General Practice in a rural setting. For further information refer to the website of the Clinic of Social and Family Medicine (http://www.fammed.uoc.gr/).
Masatoshi Matsumoto is the professor of rural health at Hiroshima University, Japan. He is a general practitioner who worked for some years in the least populated mountain village in rural Japan. He has taught rural health at Jichi Medical University, the Japanese medical school founded solely for producing rural doctors, for more than ten years. His academic interests are rural health policy, rural medical education, medical anthropology and rural community-based epidemiology.
Melissa Storey offers editorial assistance to authors at each stage in the publication process. She manages publication of papers to academic publishing standards and is responsible for editorial development. She is based north of Melbourne, Australia, and joined Rural and Remote Health as Senior Editor in 2017, following 17 years in academic science publishing. Melissa acknowledges the Wurundjeri people, Traditional Custodians of the land on which she lives and works, and pays her respects to their Elders past and present.
Jenny Bigelow has been with the journal for over 14 years. She works from regional Geelong, Victoria, and deals with the day-to-day running of the journal. She manages the smooth flow of manuscripts through the publication process and coordinates development of the journal site. She has specific graphics skills which are essential to formatting and presenting tables and figures for online publication. Jenny is an expert advisor for reviewers and journal users. Post-production, Jenny is the efficient liaison for indexing services and other agencies, and manages site statistics as well as creating the article printable pdf version. She is the friendly response from the ejrh email address. Jenny works closely with the Senior Editor.
Editorial Board
Child and adolescent psychiatrist; professor at the University of Manizales; PhD in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth. He has been a consultant for the Colombian Ministry of Health and PAHO. Researcher in social health, intercultural and rural mental health, and health services.
Kati works as a rural doctor (General Practice and Rural Hospital
Medicine)based at Rawene Hospital in Hokianga, NZ. She is Associate Professor with the Rural Section of the Department of General Practice & Rural Health and holds the Pacific Nations Liaison role at Va'a o Tautai, both at the University of Otago . She has an honorary clinical lecturer role with Auckland University.
Ellen is an associate professor and associate dean in the Trent/Fleming School of Nursing at Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada. Her areas of research interest are rural health and the social determinants of health, with a particular emphasis on rural homelessness and substance use.
Sagar Dugani is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Research Chair in the Division of Hospital Internal Medicine at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, United States. He provides care to adults hospitalized with general medical conditions. As a researcher, he serves as Director of HEXAGON, a research platform for hospital medicine across 16 Mayo Clinic hospitals in four U.S. states (Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, and Wisconsin). His research focuses on reducing health disparities, in particular, for rural populations and people of underserved race/ethnic groups. Sagar has healthcare experience from work in India, Canada, United Arab Emirates, United States, and as a Consultant to The World Bank, Washington DC.
His research is funded by the US National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIH/NIMHD) and the Robert and Elizabeth Strickland Career Development Award.
Twitter/X: @SagarDugani_MD
Sally Hall is a Registered Nurse and health services researcher at the Australian National University, where she is also Professor of Rural Health and leads the Rural Clinical School.
Dr. Randolph Hubach is Director of the Sexual Health Research Lab at Purdue University and Associate Professor of Public Health. He holds a Ph.D. in Health Behavior from Indiana University’s School of Public Health and MPH from California State University, Fullerton. Early in his career, Dr. Hubach’s research and practice experiences included serving as PI on a federally funded community-based sexual health intervention project, developing managed care programs for local public health and mental health jurisdictions, and serving in leadership positions in multiple community health coalitions and planning processes. As a behavioral scientist and public health researcher, he has gained a practical understanding of the challenges associated with the delivery of public health programs that are scientifically sound and responsive to the needs of diverse communities.
Dr. Hubach’s research interests include using community engaged principles to address sexuality-related health disparities, sexual behavior, LGBT population health, and HIV/AIDS within urban and rural communities.Dr. Randolph Hubach is Director of the Sexual Health Research Lab at Purdue University and Associate Professor of Public Health. He holds a Ph.D. in Health Behavior from Indiana University’s School of Public Health and MPH from California State University, Fullerton. Early in his career, Dr. Hubach’s research and practice experiences included serving as PI on a federally funded community-based sexual health intervention project, developing managed care programs for local public health and mental health jurisdictions, and serving in leadership positions in multiple community health coalitions and planning processes. As a behavioral scientist and public health researcher, he has gained a practical understanding of the challenges associated with the delivery of public health programs that are scientifically sound and responsive to the needs of diverse communities.
Dr. Hubach’s research interests include using community engaged principles to address sexuality-related health disparities, sexual behavior, LGBT population health, and HIV/AIDS within urban and rural communities.
Dr. Leigh-Anne Krometis is an Associate Professor and Elizabeth and James E Turner Jr Faculty Fellow of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, USA. She earned both her BS and MS at Virginia Tech and her PhD in Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health. Her research aims to promote sustainable development of water resources while preserving public health though the identification of potential environmental threats and the engineering of solutions to minimize exposure and risk. A substantial portion of her projects focus on documenting the consequences of inadequate water and sanitation systems in the Appalachian Coalfields on both human and ecosystem health. Current projects intentionally examine the potential intersections of socioeconomic and demographic factors, infrastructure, and hydrology on patterns of human environmental exposures to emerging contaminants, including PFAS, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and waterborne lead.
Professor Markaki is an advanced practice nurse in public & community health with a medical anthropologist's perspective of global health. Her long career across the European and North American regions covers the spectrum of clinical, administrative, consulting, and academic positions. Since 2016, she is the Co-Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for International Nursing, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing.
As a health systems researcher, Dr. Markaki studies nursing's effect on primary health care outcomes. Her main interests include global health, capacity building, collaborative practice, inter-professional teaching and compassionate care.
Dr. Sean Maurice is Assistant Dean of the Northern Medical Program (a rurally focused satellite campus of UBC Medicine), and Assistant Professor in the Division of Medical Sciences at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is a 3M National Teaching Fellow (2022 recipient). He is the provincial lead for the Healthcare Travelling Roadshow: an initiative that has been bringing multidisciplinary groups of healthcare students to rural communities to present to youth on healthcare careers, since 2010 (https://www2.unbc.ca/healthcare-travelling-roadshow). His research interests include: rural distributed health professions education; and university-high school outreach and community engagement to build the rural health workforce. He gratefully acknowledges that the land on which he lives, works and plays is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh
Epidemiologist, Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG), coordinator of the EpiRural Study – cohort of older adults in the rural area of Rio Grande, RS, Brazil. During his PhD, he investigated work related morbidities among tobacco farmers in southern Brazil.
Emmanouil K. Symvoulakis was born in Heraklion, Greece, in 1972. He graduated from Faculty of Medicine, University of Naples (FEDERICO II), Italy, in 1999. He is qualified in General Practice/ Family Medicine. He defended his PhD thesis at the Medical School of University of Crete in 2007. He is author in several original papers published in international journals. He is currently involved in national and international research projects of the Clinic of Social and Family Medicine of University of Crete.
Md, DTMH, MSc, PhD, Social epidemiologist, interest in rural health, primary care and vulnerable populations. Indigenous health. Mixed methods
