ArticleThe Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association2023
A cross-sectional study of community-level physician retention and hospitalization in rural Ontario, Canada.
Article in The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rural health care workforce retention measures: A rapid scoping review.The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association · 2026Article
- Assessing patient experiences with a Virtual Triage and Assessment Centre (VTAC): a mixed-methods study using an online survey and semi-structured interviews in Renfrew County, Ontario.BMC primary care · 2025Article
- Impact of changes in primary care attachment: a scoping review.Family medicine and community health · 2025Article
- The healthcare experiences of rural-living Canadians with and without a primary care provider: a qualitative analysis of open-ended cross-sectional survey responses.Primary health care research & development · 2025Article
- Investigation of rural-urban differences in hospitalization for ambulatory care-sensitive conditions: Analysis of linked survey, hospitalization, and tax data from Canada.The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association · 2025Article
- Article
- The value of family medicine: An impossible job, done impossibly well.Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien · 2023Article
- A cross-sectional study of community-level physician retention and hospitalization in rural Ontario, Canada.The Journal of rural health : official journal of the American Rural Health Association and the National Rural Health Care Association · 2023Article
- Predictors of Land-Based Activity Participation in a National Representative Sample of Indigenous Individuals Living Off-Reserve.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeMany rural communities experience poor family physician retention. We examined the association between community-level physician retention and hospitalization for all causes and ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSCs) in 2017 among residents of rural communities in Ontario, Canada.
methodsWe conducted a population-based cross-sectional study by linking administrative data from the public health insurance program in Ontario. To create the physician retention measure for each rural community, we divided the number of family physicians who worked in the community in both 2016 and 2017 by the total number of unique family physicians in the community in either year. We grouped retention level by tertile and added a fourth category, "no physician" to include communities that did not have any residing physicians in either 2016 or 2017. Outcomes were all-cause hospitalization and ACSC hospitalization between April 1, 2017 and March 31, 2018.
findingsAmong 1,436,794 rural residents, there were 93,752 all-cause hospitalizations and 8,691 ACSC hospitalizations in 2017. After controlling for other predictors, compared to residents in low-retention communities, residents of medium- and high-retention communities were 0.888 (95% CI: 0.868-0.909) and 0.937 (95% CI: 0.915-0.960) times as likely to have all-cause hospitalization, and residents of high-retention communities were 0.918 (95% CI: 0.858-0.981) times as likely to have ACSC hospitalization in 2017.
conclusionsCommunity-level physician retention is significantly associated with all cause and ACSC hospitalization in rural communities in Ontario, and may serve as an alternate measure to assess the impact of disrupted continuity of care.
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