Health and Social Services in Rural Umbria

Three main issues are increasingly characterising Rural Areas in developed countries: aging population, difficulties in accessing services, and gender inequalities in entering the labour market. Although aging can be considered a general trend in Italy, in certain areas it has become a chronic tendency. Development policies for Rural Areas need to be based on sound and rigorous territorial analysis. In fact, rural development policies are very often based on sectoral analysis alone, with no support from territorial analysis. In this paper, a new methodology of territorial analysis with a spatially-based approach has been used to investigate the supply of health and social (child care) services in different categories of Rural Area in Umbria (peri-urban, intermediate and remote rural zones). This methodology is applied to the Umbria region in Italy, but could be easily adapted to other regions. The study found that, with per-capita public health investment in line with the Italian average, the implementation of regional health policy in recent years has focused on all areas, even the more remote ones. Nevertheless, the accessibility of health services seems to matter, especially with regards to old people and hospitals and only one third of total service delivery points serving Rural Areas offer a full set of basic services. The state of the supply of child-care services is quite different. The entire region suffers from a lack of child-care services and this study reveals an important territorial divide between urban and Rural Areas. Finally, this paper has been presented and discussed in Edinburg, at the OECD Conference on “Investment Priorities for Rural Development”.