Improving rural healthcare

A Countryside Alliance briefing note on rural healthcare provision, prepared in advance of a Westminster Hall debate on 12 October 2022.

Background

• The Countryside Alliance was keen to assist the EFRA Committee with its inquiry on rural mental health. To inform our submission we surveyed our members and supporters on their own experiences of mental health and healthcare in rural communities. Although mental health was the focus of the survey, our findings had broader relevance to all rural healthcare provision.
• Our survey ran from 8 December 2021 to 4 January 2022 and attracted a total of 717 responses, with over 1,700 individual comments. It posed a range of questions gathering both quantitative and qualitative information.

Survey findings

• Nearly 45% of respondents who lived in a rural community reported having experienced difficulties with their mental health within the past five years. Of those, however, only 38% had sought help or support from the NHS or other government-funded services, and of those, only 56% rated their satisfaction with the support they had received as Adequate (22%), Good (29%) or Very good (5%). 75% reported that they would feel more comfortable seeking help from a private provider.
• A further question asked respondents to comment on why they rated their satisfaction as they had. The commonest focus for broadly positive responses, and the positive elements within the mixed responses, was medication. Conversely, comments that focused on other forms of therapy, such as talking therapies, tended to be more negative with suggestions of poor local availability. The other key driver of a broadly negative experience revealed in the responses was difficulty with accessing services at all.
• Those who reported that they had experienced difficulties but had not sought support provided by the public sector were asked to comment on why they had not done so. The most common reason was a lack of awareness of or confidence in the services available.
• Meanwhile of those who had not experienced difficulties, 38% reported that they were Not at all confident that adequate support would be available from the NHS or government, and a further 38% were only Slightly confident.
• Comments overwhelmingly focused on confidence in the local NHS as a whole. Positive answers frequently expressed confidence in the respondent's GP, whereas negative responses focused on perceptions that NHS care in general, and mental health support in particular, is difficult to access.
• We also asked respondents about their preferred means of service delivery. 67% expressed a preference for In person service, only 8% preferred service to be delivered Online and the remaining 25% had No preference.
• Of those who preferred services delivered in person, respondents most commonly indicated it was a matter of personal preference. The second most prominent reason was the belief that services are delivered more effectively in that format. The third was that some respondents either disliked or expected technical difficulties in using a computer, including as a result of inadequate digital connectivity.
• The relatively small number of respondents who expressed a preference for services delivered online also most cited their personal preference, for reasons such as ease, comfort and privacy. There was also a sense on the part of some respondents that in-person services would be difficult to access, owing to a lack of local availability.