ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses issues involved in providing formal personal social care services, facilities and resources to rural Australians and examines how these can relate with informal, or natural, caring processes. Nationally-agreed realistic minimum standards for formal social care provisions should be developed and enforced throughout the nation. A number of United States studies have shown that fear of stigmatisation is a primary reason why rural people are less likely than urban residents to access formal social care services and more likely to withdraw from them prematurely. In Australia, most formal social care services are specialised in that they derive from vertically-segregated programs rather than local needs and conditions. Rural people have far greater access to information about social care services than they did a decade ago and a number of information dissemination strategies have been tried with varying degrees of success.
