Based on research that I've done over a number of years, I would say that people everywhere--city, country, anywhere--have a security need. They need to know that if they're unlucky enough to be seriously ill or injured, the system is there to save them.
In the urban areas that's a given. There are emergency departments and ambulances going backwards and forwards and so on, so the focus on health concerns is elsewhere. In the remote and rural areas, the people there know they can't take for granted that they have a hospital with an emergency department and the services they need. So that's a major preoccupation.
The research we've done shows that in order to ensure that people have the services they need, you really need to focus on that safety net and how that's provided in their community. There are many different ways of doing that.
We did a major study in Australia looking at 22 different remote communities and how they had their health services organized, and there were many different ones. There were a number of key elements. A key element that might be surprising was community participation. Where the services worked best there was a community representative organization that had a responsibility for the ongoing development of the health service, for recruiting health practitioners and supporting them, and there are all the things I said about the family, etc. But a key component is active community participation.