Continuing care in rural Alberta: a scoping review

This is an open-access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modification or adaptations are made.Across Canada the demand for continuing care services is increasing. However, little is known about the implications this has for rural communities. This scoping review identifies several key themes in the literature related to continuing care in Alberta. These include contextual factors, quality assurance and improvement, and workforce issues. We identify the ways in which rural dynamics are included in, or omitted from, this literature and recommend areas for future research on rural continuing care provision. Further research on residential care services in rural communities should work towards bridging the rural health, academic, and organizational literature on continuing care. This synthesis will help to position rurality as a determinant of health and to situate continuing care services in specific rural settings.Ye