In the past rural and remote communities ran the local hospital with a community board, and social care services such as disability support, aged care and welfare were provided by NGOs run by local people. Over the last decade governments moved to take-over these functions. In the hospital sector, local rural hospitals were taken over by larger regional networks and local boards replaced. In the social services sector, small charities that provided local services using local people were consumed by large corporate charities located in metropolitan and regional cities. The effect of these changes was the loss of local community control over health and social care in rural and remote communities, and a serious decline in access to services and health outcomes. Over the last several years, there has been growing number of research papers that demonstrate that this loss of community knowledge, engagement and commitment has been a major contributor to the failure of rural health and social care services in Australia to meet community needs. Genuine community control was replaced with "superficial engagement" and the "community is denied access to the decision-making process, and interactions tend toward tokenism and marginalization, or the community is simply informed of plans or consulted to provide limited perspectives on select activities". This article explore the concept of meaningful community engagement, and how governments can work collaboratively with communities and residents ("through those who share similar situations, concerns, or challenges").

The Australian primary Health Care Plan sets out the Commonwealth Government's strategy to support and grow primary health care services in Australia. The plan concentrates on three streams of work: future focused health care; person-centred primary health care supported by funding reform; and integrated care, locally delivered. The plan aims to support primary health care providers to embrace continuing advances in technology: in telehealth and virtual care; in digital health; and in other health care technologies including point of care testing, genomics and pharmacogenomics and precision medicine. It aims to support patient-centred continuity of care through a proposed system of voluntary patient registration with general practice.

This is your ‘go-to’ resources when preparing a grant application, submission to an inquiry or government, or a business case relating to health and social welfare in rural and remote communities. The PHIDU does all the work for you by collating information from numerous different sources and putting it all together by local government area, Primary Health Network (PHN) regions and remoteness areas. Want to compare fruit and vegetable intake in Bourke compared to Brisbane, developmental vulnerability in children in Cunnamulla and Canberra, educational participation in Dubbo and Darwin - this is the resource you need. It is a fantastic and highly valuable collection that can help you to make your case for investment both only in improved health service access, but also targeting social factors that can have a negative impact on health outcomes in your community such as unemployment, overcrowded housing or low vaccination rates.

The Bonded Medical Places scheme was established in 2004. In return for the payment of the student contribution to the HECS fee, participants agreed to work in an area of medical workforce need for a specified period after they completed their Fellowship (which could be 10-15 years after commencing medical school). A 2017 audit found that of nearly 10,000 participants who receive free money from the Government since 2001, less than 1% had actually completed their return of service obligation to work in an area of workforce need. A Senate Inquiry recommended that the program be abolished. The Inquiry noted a submission from Rural and Remote Medical Services (now the Healthy Communities Foundation Australia) citing a previous review of the program in 2013 that many BMP recipients view the program as a “low cost or interest free loan that can relatively easily be repaid once fully qualified”. Ochre Recruitment stated to the Inquiry that some students react with incredulity when asked why they chose to go rural, Hamish Meldrum GP from Ochre Health said: “They laugh at me and say: ‘No. Nobody wants to go rural. We just put down that we want to be rurally bonded students so that we can get into medical school.”

The Health Equity Toolkit provides tools, resources, and information for communities to tackle the social determinants of health—those conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including social and economic factors that have a great influence on people’s health.

Burnout in health care undermines the safety of patients and practitioners alike. Burnout is a serious problem in the hospital system in Australia with studies showing up to 58% of Australian health care workers report feeling moderate to severe burnout. A recent parliamentary inquiries into rural hospitals found unacceptable levels of harassment, victimisation, bullying and cover-ups in NSW hospitals, reinforcing studies that have found that up to 50% of doctors and trainees (not including medical students) have experienced bullying, discrimination, harassment or sexual harassment in the hospital system.

The Census of the Australian population occurs every 4 years. It captures information about the Australian population at various levels of geography including suburbs, towns, local government areas etc. The data is used by department and agencies to make decisions about the allocation of funding and the needs of different populations. The Census is, however, only complete if everyone fills out the Census every four years. Some rural, remote and Aboriginal people in particular do not complete the Census for a range of reasons. This means that the population of some towns is under-estimated, and the community will therefore receive fewer resources from government than the community deserves. Making sure every person in a town completes the Census every 4 years is essential for rural and remote towns to get the resources they need.

Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems level change. Collective impact initiatives implement the five conditions:

a common agenda
shared measurement
mutually reinforcing activities
continuous communications
trust and strengthening relationships.

The five conditions and equity practices are a framework and guide, rather than a checklist or formula, and should be customized for the local context.

The Deans publish data annually to report on the number of medical students enrolled in Australian universities. The dashboard allows data to be broken down by rural/urban background to provide rural and remote people with up to date information about how their local university is performing in supporting rural and remote students to study medicine and address rural doctor shortages.

The Community Engagement program at Harvard University was designed to increase the pace of adoption of evidence-based programs and policies to promote health, prevent disease, and eliminate disparities. In alignment with community-identified needs and interests, the University employs a combination of implementation science, policy research, and community partnerships. The program works to create mechanisms for high-quality engagement with community and policy stakeholders, partnering with collaborators to identify opportunities for accelerating population-level outcomes while providing robust research and training opportunities in community translation and increasing the pipeline of well-trained individuals interested in this field.

Community engagement is a fundamental practice of public health. This Community Engagement Guide outlines an approach that may be taken by health and hospital service providers, social service organisations, residential aged care facilities and other human service organisations to support effective community engagement that contributes to social equity and justice, and improved program performance in meeting the needs of rural and remote people.

Planning creates great places for people to live, work and play. To encourage genuine community engagement in the planning process, the Queensland Government produced this toolkit to help local councils engage with their communities about planning in a meaningful and open manner. The toolkit has was developed with advice from community engagement specialists and their peak representative body – the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2). IAP2 has endorsed the toolkit.