Improving Health Care Accessibility among Geriatric Patients in Rural Communities

This poster compiles information regarding ways to improve rural geriatric healthcare accessibility through the use of inter-professional care and outreach. I also wish to bring to light the various deficiencies often seen in this realm of care, and the reasons behind the inadequate rural physician retention rates. Using this background information, I compiled various collaborative approaches that seek to ease the strain faced by the healthcare system and its elderly patients. Improving healthcare accessibility through the use of interprofessional care and outreach is an essential facet of geriatric medicine. By exploring the deficiencies of geriatric healthcare in rural and underserved areas, as well as highlighting methods that are being implemented to better serve their geriatric patients, we can identify ways in which to restructure our care systems. This review seeks to better understand the barriers that lead to the decreased rural physician and geriatric specialist retention rates, evaluate the causality of insufficient healthcare access due to pre-existing barriers on rural geriatric patients, and compare the effectiveness of various collaborative interprofessional solutions to the lack of geriatric health care available.