Chronically Ill Rural Women’s Views of Health Care

Abstract

Successful adaptation to chronic illness requires a collaborative relationship between ill individuals and health care providers. This article reports a secondary analysis of data from a computer-outreach intervention that examined the experiences of 110 chronically ill rural women in communicating with their health care providers and determined factors that influenced their satisfaction with care received. Five themes identified from qualitative data were: self-reliance; treatment/therapies; interactions with health care providers; financial constraints; and accessibility of health care. Quantitatively, three independent variables contributed significantly (p<.05) to the prediction of health care satisfaction: quality of life, life change, and health status change. Overall, 25% of the variance in satisfaction with health care was explained by the model. Health care providers can enhance chronically ill rural women’s satisfaction with care by: improved interpersonal relationships; collaboration in care management; appointment scheduling that accommodates rural life-styles; and open discussion of financial concerns.