subject: What Exactly Is A Rural Area And Why Should We Care 3 [print this page] Rural areas are designated by census as those areas that do not lie inside an urbanized area or urban cluster. NCES has classified all schools into one of these twelve categories based on schools' actual addresses and their corresponding coordinates of latitude and longitude. Not only does this mean that the location of any school can be identified precisely, but also that distance measures can be used to identify town and rural subtypes."
Rural health definitions can be different for establishing underserved areas or health care accessibility in rural areas of the United States. According to the handbook, Definitions of Rural, A Handbook for Health Policy Makers and Researchers, "Residents of metropolitan counties are generally thought to have easy access to the relatively concentrated health services of the county's central areas. However, some metropolitan counties are so large that they contain small towns and rural, sparsely populated areas that are isolated from these central clusters and their corresponding health services by physical barriers."
To address this type of rural area, "Harold Goldsmith, Dena Puskin, and Dianne Stiles (1992) described a methodology to identify small towns and rural areas within large metropolitan counties (LMCs) that were isolated from central areas by distance or other physical features." This became the Goldsmith Modification definition of rural. "Bhoomeet rural education The Goldsmith Modification has been useful for expanding the eligibility for federal programs that assist rural populatk'ions, to include the isolated rural populations of large metropolitan counties."
In Britain, "rural" is defined by the government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), using population data from the latest census, such as the United Kingdom Census 2001. These definitions have various grades, but the upper point is any local government area with less than 26 percent of its population living in a market town ("market town" being defined as any settlement which has permission to hold a street market). The British countryside, especially in the south of England, is perceived as under threat, and a number of measures including green belts are used to protect it.
An NHS patient is defined as rural if they live more than 5 km (3.1 miles) from either a doctor or a dispensing chemist. This is important for defining whether the patient is expected to collect their own medicines. While doctors' surgeries in towns will not have a dispensing chemist, instead expecting patients to use a high street chemist to purchase their prescription medicines, in rural village surgeries, (an NHS dispensary will be built into the same building).
