In rural areas, getting health care can be harder for minorities; travel time tells the story, a new study shows

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Getting to a health-care provider in rural America can be tough. Details from a new study show that if you're rural and you're from a minority population, it's even harder to get needed medical treatment, reports Liz Carey of The Daily Yonder. "The report from the Rural and Minority Health Research Center looked at how close some ZIP codes were to different kinds of health care. Then they looked at access in areas with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minorities. What the study found, said Janice Probst, lead author, was that the availability of different kinds of health care was worse for rural minorities."

"If you are in a rural area, you're going to be further (from health care) than in an urban area just because that's what rural is — it's defined by being distant," Probst told Carey, "And if there are certain populations for whom it is really hard (to access health care)… If you are further away from that access or further away from those services, then you are less likely to take advantage of them."

"Researchers looked at rural ZIP codes in the lower 48 states to find out how many of them are within 15 or 30 miles of various healthcare services – a Federally Qualified Health Center or a Rural Health Clinic," Carey explains. "Then they went a step further and looked at how far urban and rural communities with higher proportions of minorities are from those same services. . . . . Consistently, the researchers found that rural ZIP code areas with higher proportions of minority residents were more likely to be further away from those health-care services."

How did the disparity develop? "The cause, Probst said, is rooted in history. She said Black populations in the 'Old South,' as well as Hispanic populations in the Southwest, are holdovers from historical settlement patterns," Carey reports. "Similarly, she said, states in the West have higher American Indian and Alaskan Native populations, but also have lower population density and require residents to travel greater distances. . . . Communities with higher proportions of AI/AN residents were more likely to have further to travel for every healthcare category the study looked at."

The study looked at "substance-abuse-disorder treatment, and only 9.7% of all urban ZIP code areas are more than 15 miles from a treatment facility, but 45.2% of rural ZIP code areas with higher proportions of AI/AN residents are," Carey writes. "Similarly, more than a third of all rural ZIP codes with higher proportions of Hispanic residents reported being more than 30 miles away from trauma centers (42.1%), intensive care units (39.7%), and obstetrics units (29.1%) . . . .The findings are important, Probst said, because the availability of care influences whether or not a patient uses that service. And without access to those services, rural residents will likely go without the health care they need."