Rural Health
Research Gateway

1998 Research Publications

Browse the full list of research publications from the Rural Health Research Centers.

Products – Freely accessible products include policy briefs, fact sheets, full reports, chartbooks, and interactive data websites.

Journal Articles – Articles in peer-reviewed journals may require a subscription or affiliation with a subscribing library. For these publications, Gateway lists the article citation, a brief summary, a link to additional information and access to the full-text of the article, if available.

  • Availability of Anesthesia Personnel in Rural Washington and Montana
    Journal Article
    WWAMI Rural Health Research Center
    Date: 03/1998
    Anesthesia has historically been an undersupplied specialty. Health personnel issues used to be dominated by the findings of the 1980 Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee study, which suggested that anesthesia would be a balanced specialty for the rest of the century. Recent studies, however, have demonstrated that there is an oversupply of all specialists, including anesthesiology. These studies take a "top down" view of health personnel through analysis of national statistics and exploration of subsets of the data by hospital size and rurality. This approach assumes that the databases of the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association are accurate and do not take into account the presence of certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs), who are the predominant providers of anesthesia care in the smallest and most remote hospitals in the United States. We compared the 1994 master file of the American Medical Association with our local knowledge of the practitioners in the rural areas of Washington state and found numerous small errors. These errors of one or two practitioners made no difference to the analysis of practitioner groups with more than approximately five people, but in the most rural communities the erroneous presence or absence of a single practitioner made a significant difference.
  • Anticipating the 1997 State Children's Health Insurance Program: What's Current in Five Rural States?
    NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis
    Date: 01/1998
    This study examines aspects of existing children's health insurance or health services for low-income, uninsured children.