Health Services for Rural South Dakota
This item was digitized with the support from Project CERES, a collaboration between USAIN, AgNIC, and the Center for Research Libraries.
Description
Health services have traditionally followed population concentrations. Two-thirds of the people in the United States are reported to live on ten per cent of the land area. The remaining one-third are widely dispersed over the remaining 90 per cent. The distribution of physicians is even more unequal. In 1969 the population to physician ratio ranged from a low of 450 persons per physician in urban areas of 5 million or more inhabitants, to a high of 2,103 persons per physician in rural areas of less than 10,000 inhabitants. This is almost 5 times as many people per doctor in rural areas than in urban areas.