Responding to Health Outcomes and Access to Health and Hospital Services in Rural, Regional and Remote New South Wales

Abstract

Ethical perspectives on regional, rural, and remote healthcare often, understandably and importantly, focus on inequities in access to services. In this commentary, we take the opportunity to examine the implications of normalizing metrocentric views, values, knowledge, and orientations, evidenced by the recent (2022) New South Wales inquiry into health outcomes and access to hospital and health services in regional, rural and remote New South Wales, for contemporary rural governance and justice debates. To do this, we draw on the feminist inspired approach to rural health ethics involving analysis of power relationships developed by Simpson and McDonald and related ideas from critical health sociology. In presenting this analysis, we extend contemporary thought about spatial health inequities and structural violence.

Keywords: Access to health services; Australia; Governance of health services; Rural bioethics; Rural health; Rural health ethics; Social justice; Spatial inequities; Structural violence.