ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analytical approach to rural–urban differences for common hospitalizations. It presents main surveillance results that include rural–urban differences in about 40 hospitalization categories, rural hospital bypassing rates, and distance to hospitals. The chapter also presents a case study of rural–urban differences in injuries. The two forces—age structure and poverty level—seem to work against each other in the context of rural–urban differences. In public health practice, age effects should be explicitly documented, even though our main interest is rural–urban difference. In this way, people can target specific age groups for intervention. Since prior assessments rarely bring neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and rural–urban dimensions together at the population level, surveillance along these two lines that considers the whole state over a sufficient period of time may shed new insight into preventing injury hospitalization. It seemed that the SES effect outweighed the age effect.
