ArticlePloS one2025
Interlinkage between health workforce availability and socioeconomic status in rural and remote Australia.
Article in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Regional Disparities and Associated Factors Underlying CDC Health Professional Distribution in China.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Quantifying and Understanding Healthcare Service Access for Geographically Distributed Communities: The Application of Address-Level Intelligence.The Australian journal of rural health · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionAustralians living in rural and remote areas experience a higher burden of disease compared to their urban counterparts, whilst having poorer access to essential health services. Socioeconomic status and health workforce shortages are important influences on health status and access to care in these areas. This research aims to provide a local-level analysis of the association between local government area (LGA) indicators of socio-economic status and health workforce availability to enhance understanding of rural and remote workforce distribution patterns.
methodsData were extracted from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Department of Health and Aged care, which encompassed demographic factors, socioeconomic indicators and counts for medical practitioners, allied health workers and nurses and midwives within non-metropolitan local government areas. Generalised Additive Models with Generalised Estimating Equations (GEE-GAMs) were used to test for an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and the World Health Organisation's definition of health workforce deficit.
resultsThe odds of being in deficit of nurses and midwives increased with increasing SES. No significant association between SES and medical practitioners or allied healthcare workers was found. Very remote areas were less likely to have a deficit of allied health professionals than inner regional areas, and the same was true for nurses and midwives in both remote and very remote areas.
conclusionsThe findings suggest that health workforce policies that target areas of need based on SES, may have contributed to better availability of nurses and midwives in these locations, but not significantly so for medical practitioners or allied health professionals. Further research is required to investigate the relative success of workforce policies in addressing health need in relation to SES and remoteness.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.