Good quality and comprehensive health care for rural communities starts with the design of policies that are appropriate for the rural health care context. The rural health care context often implies “doing more with less”; it is most often a context of high levels of poverty and ill-health, without ready access to specialists, intensive and/or high technology care, and where resources, both human and material, are lacking. From a patient perspective, it also means rural communities often spend disproportionate amounts of time and money trying to access the health care and treatment that they require.

General health policies, or policies designed with more resourced urban settings in mind, are seldom automatically implementable in rural areas. There is thus a need to take the rural context into account at all stages of policy development. This process of inclusion of the rural context is popularly reffered to as ‘rural-proofing’.

Under this strategic objective, the RHAP advocates for rural-friendly policies; this implies analysing existing and new general health policies through a rural lens, as well as advocating for specific rural health policies. The end goal is to ensure that existing and new legislation, strategies and frameworks will advance the equitable access of rural communities to comprehensive, high quality health care that meets their health needs.