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What is the overall impact or effectiveness of visiting primary health care services in rural and remote communities in high-income countries? A systematic review

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Health Services Research, June 2018
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Title
What is the overall impact or effectiveness of visiting primary health care services in rural and remote communities in high-income countries? A systematic review
Published in
BMC Health Services Research, June 2018
DOI 10.1186/s12913-018-3269-5
Pubmed ID
Authors

Timothy A. Carey, David Sirett, Deborah Russell, John S. Humphreys, John Wakerman

Abstract

Visiting services address the problem of workforce deficit and access to effective primary health care services in isolated remote and rural locations. Little is known about their impact or effectiveness and thereby the extent to which they are helping to reduce the disparity in access and health outcomes between people living in remote areas compared with people living in urban regions of Australia. The objective of this study was to answer the question "What is the impact or effectiveness when different types of primary health care services visit, rather than reside in, rural and remote communities?" We conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature from established databases. We also searched relevant websites for 'grey' literature and contacted several key informants to identify other relevant reference material. All papers were reviewed by at least two assessors according to agreed inclusion and exclusion criteria. Initially, 345 papers were identified and, from this selection, 17 papers were considered relevant for inclusion. Following full paper review, another ten papers were excluded leaving seven papers that provided some information about the impact or effectiveness of visiting services. The papers varied with regard to study design (ranging from cluster randomised controlled trials to a case study), research quality, and the strength of their conclusions. In relation to effectiveness or impact, results were mixed. There was a lack of consistent data regarding the features or characteristics of visiting services that enhance their effectiveness or impact. Almost invariably the evaluations assessed the service provided but only two papers mentioned any aspect of the visiting features within which service provision occurred such as who did the visiting and how often they visited. There is currently an inadequate evidence base from which to make decisions about the effectiveness of visiting services or how visiting services should be structured in order to achieve better health outcomes for people living in remote and rural areas. Given this knowledge gap, we suggest that more rigorous evaluation of visiting services in meeting community health needs is required, and that evaluation should be guided by a number of salient principles.

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Mendeley readers

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The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 57 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 57 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 10 18%
Student > Master 7 12%
Student > Ph. D. Student 6 11%
Other 4 7%
Student > Postgraduate 3 5%
Other 8 14%
Unknown 19 33%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 17 30%
Nursing and Health Professions 5 9%
Psychology 2 4%
Social Sciences 2 4%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 2 4%
Other 8 14%
Unknown 21 37%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 January 2019.
All research outputs
#17,981,442
of 23,092,602 outputs
Outputs from BMC Health Services Research
#6,382
of 7,738 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#236,648
of 328,040 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Health Services Research
#191
of 213 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,092,602 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 19th percentile – i.e., 19% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
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