Office of Rural Health releases strategic plan to help address health disparities between urban and rural areas

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "unveiled its Rural Public Health Strategic Plan, which outlines the priorities, objectives and outcomes the agency hopes to see over the next five years as it collaborates with stakeholders on how to improve the health of rural residents," reports Liz Carey of The Daily Yonder. This plan is the overarching guide for CDC and its Office of Rural Health to use as it works to address health disparities between urban and rural areas. 

The plan has four primary focuses: "Engaging with community health partners, strengthening rural public health infrastructure, advancing rural public health science, and improving rural public health preparedness and response," Carey explains. "The plan isn’t regionally or state-specific, but it is a step toward an action plan."

To help all stakeholders develop strategies within the four focus points, "the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC, will release an updated method for urban-rural classification, before the end of the year," Carey reports. "That will make researching rural health issues easier, Katy Backes Kozhimannil, the co-director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center told Carey. One of the issues facing researchers is determining the rurality of subjects."

Dr. Diane Hall, the director of the CDC’s Office of Rural Health, told Carey, "We really wanted the strategic plan to actually be strategic, but also be actionable. But more than that, we wanted it to be relevant to the lives of people that live in rural communities.”