Rural and Remote Health is an open-access international academic journal serving rural and remote communities and publishing articles by rural health practitioners, educators, researchers and policy makers.

Clinical courage describes an integral part of rural clinical practice in which doctors work at the limits of their scope of practice to provide place-based medical care not routinely available in their specific rural context, based on sound clinical reasoning. However, deviations from conventional best practice that result from rural doctors’ adaptive expertise can potentially be considered poor practice by the city-based professional establishment. To make the practice of clinical courage more explicit, this Commentary proposes the COURAgE mnemonic, which can act as a tool for discussing modifications to conventional care with rural patients, their families and members of the local rural healthcare team as well as with city-based specialist support services.

Despite being particularly vulnerable due to the wide range of stressors they experience, farmers face ongoing challenges in accessing timely, appropriate, and culturally responsive mental health care. Barriers to help-seeking include stoicism, self-reliance, stigma, limited mental health literacy, and structural constraints such as distance, cost, and long wait times. In response to these barriers, mental healthcare providers have adapted their services to respond to the unique needs and challenges associated with the agricultural lifestyle. This Original Research study explored the perspectives of mental healthcare providers who work with farmers to identify their strategies for fostering trust and therapeutic alliance.

Sustaining a multidisciplinary allied health workforce of adequate size and skills is a longstanding issue for rural and remote health services, and workforce distribution in Australia remains skewed towards metropolitan areas. Rural Generalist Training Positions (RGTPs) for allied health professions have been trialled in Queensland as a new strategy to improve recruitment, retention and workforce capacity. This Original Research article reports on the largest evaluation of RGTPs in the public sector to date and adds to the emerging body of literature on allied health early-career rural generalist workforce development.

Mapping the knowledge, perceptions, and existing practices regarding rabies is considered an important milestone in the control and prevention of the disease. Although the magnitude and distribution of rabies exposure in the Tigray region of Ethiopia is high, there has been no coordinated study on the community’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) concerning rabies in the Tigray Region. This Original Research study assessed the community's level of KAP towards rabies and retrospectively analyzes human and animal rabies exposure cases over the past 5 years in the project area.

Health practitioners in many rural and remote communities experience inadequate timely professional support because of a shortage of on-site, experienced practitioners and geographic barriers. Research suggests that telehealth technologies can help less-experienced local staff, healthcare providers and patients in such areas access real-time, effective professional support and guidance from experts located elsewhere. This Original Research study evaluates the usability of augmented reality technology for telementorship between central medical specialists and rural junior doctors in Vietnam, assesses the perceived effectiveness of the mentoring relationship, and explores patient acceptability of AR technology during clinical consultations.