Educator Starting Points

Find out how healthcare, public health, and health administration educators and faculty can use RHIhub to support their work training the future workforce about rural health issues.

For additional information specific to health professions education and financial aid, see the Healthcare Workforce Starting Points.

Introduction to Rural Issues for Students

The Topic Guides introduce current and ongoing issues related to rural healthcare delivery and population health. Here you can find a starting point for all the information on RHIhub on each of the over 50 topics — an overview of key issues informed by expert reviewers, along with freely available publications, websites, news, organizations, and more from a wide range of federal agencies, national organizations, and other reputable sources. You are welcome to share links to these guides with your students as an introduction to exploring specific rural issues.

Evidence-Based Toolkits for Rural Community Health offer step-by-step guides on how to build effective rural community health programs. The Rural Community Health Toolkit offers in-depth information on program design and evaluation, sustainability, and more. Specific toolkits on topics like health literacy, maternal health, emergency preparedness, and other important issues offer program models and topic-specific considerations to help students learn about how to work to address rural concerns.

The Case Studies & Conversations section shares insights from rural programs and leaders, including feature stories, podcast episodes, videos, and more, and can be another useful resource for learning about rural concerns. In this section, Rural Health Models and Innovations includes examples of rural health projects undertaken in rural communities, with information on the services provided, audiences served, results, and lessons learned.

The Online Library provides access to publications, funding opportunities, events, news, and more from government agencies, research organizations, nonprofits, and others with an interest in rural health.

Rural Definitions

The What is Rural? topic guide provides an overview of the numerous definitions of rural and how they are used in program planning, policymaking, and research. In addition, the Am I Rural? tool can be used to determine whether a specific location is considered rural under various definitions.

Rural Data and Rural Health Research for Student Projects

The Finding Statistics and Data Related to Rural Health topic guide and its companion Data Sources & Tools Relevant to Rural Health provide an introduction to where to find and how to use statistics and data to understand rural health issues and inform decision making. The Rural Data Explorer, Chart Gallery, and Maps offer a wide range of data visualizations on rural health issues and may be used in student assignments, activities, and reports, with appropriate citation of RHIhub.

The Conducting Rural Health Research, Needs Assessments, and Program Evaluations topic guide is available to help students planning to undertake a research, assessment, or evaluation as part of their educational program.

Resource and Referral Service

RHIhub can help educators find additional information on a wide variety of topics related to rural health. Contact info@ruralhealthinfo.org for customized assistance. Students who identify themselves as such will be pointed in the direction to find information but with a recognition that some part of the educational process is in seeking of information. The Resource and Referral Service is staffed Monday-Friday from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Central.