Documenting the urbanistic policy bias in rural early childhood services: Toward a functional definition of rurality

One of the promises of the Canada Health Act is portabilitythe principle of equitable access to health services wherever you live. Services for young children in northern and rural communities are structured with a one-size-fits-all funding model that inadvertently disadvantages lower population density areas. We use a socio-cultural approach to explore the barriers to access to rural early childhood services. With data from two research projects that each covered diverse rural contexts, we focused on service providers' and parents' experiences in accessing early intervention and early development programs and services for children with typical development, and those with developmental delay and/or diagnosed disabilities. The results affirm the value of rural and small town life and provide information for developing a more effective rural service delivery model for families with children with typical and atypical development. We demonstrate the way providers and parents make rural services work through relational functionality. Parents and service providers rely on key community agents to help organize and innovate collaborative solutions to address lack of access to information, intermodal travel demands, and administrative divides. In short, we confirm an urbanistic policy bias in the per capita funding model.