Rural Nursing The first study, by Alexy and Elnitsky, looked at rural American residents over the age of 65 to assess their general health and risk factors. They found clusters of people with similar concerns that limited their ability to function in life and determined that community health interventions should begin well before the age of 65. The second study, by Anyango et. al., surveyed nurses in Uganda to determine whether rural Ugandan nurses felt they had been well prepared for their jobs as rural nurses. This research found that the nurses had to do a lot of supervision and tat they felt unprepared to do so. They struggled with such tasks as prioritizing their work activities.

The two studies looked at the problems of rural nursing in different ways. The assumption in the first study was that the nurses were trained adequately for their jobs and focused on patient needs. The second study focused on the needs of the rural nurses themselves, and those findings suggest...

The Ugandan nurses faced more difficult circumstances as rural nurses because more of the burden of providing medical help falls on them and because rural Uganda is in the grip of a major AIDS epidemic.
Before reading these articles I did not realize that rural nursing could present such significant difficulties. The American nurses were faced with older people who sometimes had not had adequate medical care for years. The patients' needs went beyond nursing care as some struggled with such basic things as paying bills and buying groceries. In addition a significant number of the rural Americans in the study had serious nutritional problems. It was actually quite a shock to read that these elderly patients faced such problems in a country with so many assets.

The rural nurses in Uganda were struggling to deal with…