Rural and Remote Health is an open-access international academic journal serving rural and remote communities and publishing articles by rural health practitioners, educators, researchers and policy makers.

Delivering healthcare in remote emergency contexts is inherently complex and demands timely, effective, and well-coordinated responses to ensure access to appropriate care. In such settings, healthcare professionals’ perceptions of context-specific risks and operational challenges are critical to preventing adverse events and ensuring patient safety. They must be prepared to navigate unpredictable scenarios and take proactive measures to safeguard both patient outcomes and their own wellbeing. This Scoping Review identifies risks, and reports on management and mitigation of risks, to patients, themselves and service delivery among healthcare professionals in remote emergency care.

Papua represents one of the most disadvantaged provinces in Indonesia, with high maternal mortality, remote geography, limited health infrastructure, and entrenched cultural practices that hinder care-seeking. Previous studies on maternal mortality in Indonesia have mostly emphasized biomedical complications or relied on national-level averages, without accounting for sharp structural differences across regions. Few have applied a multilevel framework to capture both individual- and community-level determinants simultaneously. This Original Research study addresses that gap by analyzing maternal deaths in Papua using the 2020 Indonesia Population Census, paying particular attention to rural–urban residence and providing new evidence to inform equitable maternal health strategies in rural and remote settings.

Internationally, suicide rates tend to be higher in less populated, rural areas. Community-based suicide prevention interventions often include community education, gatekeeper training, establishing or increasing access to mental health and crisis services and encouraging community-building through action groups and peer support networks. Despite anecdotal increases in such initiatives in rural and regional Australia, formal evaluations remain limited. This Review maps the breadth of community-based suicide prevention initiatives, examines their impacts and outcomes in rural and remote Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, and identifies evidence-based practices, knowledge gaps and future research directions.

Narratives on the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic from African Indigenous communities are inadequately represented in the literature, even though historic and structural inequities create vulnerabilities that are best understood by the communities that live and exist within these contexts. This Original Research article explores the pandemic experiences of the Indigenous Xhosa people of Thamarha, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa: how they understand health and wellbeing and what actions they took to protect their health and wellbeing in the face of the pandemic.

In Brazil, breast cancer is one of the most prevalent tumor types among women, and is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality. In rural and remote areas, women can miss out on early detection, timely diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer owing to their distance from healthcare facilities and screening services, and limited availability of mammography services. Despite these well-documented challenges, a paucity of empirical evidence is available on the performance of breast cancer screening programs in remote regions of the Brazilian Amazon. This Original Research article reports on the implementation of a breast cancer screening program in remote regions of the state of Acre, Brazil.