Globally, the number of people living with diabetes in rural and regional areas is disproportionally high. In these areas, people with diabetes are more likely to develop complications, more likely to be admitted to hospital and more likely to die than people living in cities.
Rural diabetes care challenges
Rural diabetes care challenges include workforce shortages, fewer specialist services, and fragmented healthcare services. People living in rural and regional areas may also experience socioeconomic disadvantage and have unreliable access to existing services and to infrastructure that delivers digital health services. Even in high-income countries, where there have been overall improvements in diabetes outcomes, people in rural and remote communities continue to face challenges managing their diabetes with higher complication rates and delayed access to evidence-based care.
Rural diabetes research challenges
The same challenges that impact delivery of diabetes care in rural areas also impact rural research. Distance, access, population density, service availability and communication and transport infrastructure can make conducting research in rural areas difficult. In the face of these challenges, rural diabetes care is often based on research in metropolitan settings, which differs considerably to rural settings.
Additional gaps in rural diabetes research include:
- the absence of a single global organisation dedicated exclusively to rural diabetes research or rural models of care.
- limited cross country comparative research on rural diabetes models of care
- under representation of rural, remote, and First Nations communities in digital health innovation and evaluation
- weak translation of evidence into real world service redesign
- lack of coordinated infrastructure to support multinational grant applications
- limited structured international pathways for rural workforce training and exchange.
We aim to meet these challenges by pooling resources from global diabetes and rural health experts and coordinating efforts to deliver evidence-based, practical solutions.