Associate ProfessorTim Baker

Small rural emergency departments are not simply cut-down versions of large urban emergency departments. Although they treat a similar range of patients, they have different clinical and organisational challenges. Australia has over 400 small rural hospitals, that manage about 15% of Australia's emergency presentations, or almost 1.3 million attendances per year. Unfortunately, there is little research to guide evidence based care in these facilities.

Associate Professor Baker has published articles on many of the key areas of rural emergency medicine, including;
* Developing an emergency dataset for use by small rural emergency facilities for the Victorian Department of Health
* The activity, performance and resources of small rural emergency departments (using the RAHDaR dataset)
* Using alcohol use screening of emergency department patients to guide public health interventions
* Health literacy of rural communities
* Demographics of acute injury and illness in rural areas

Current projects include;
* Developing evidence-based Entrustable Professional Activities for Rural Emergency Medicine
* Developing the Rural Research in Emergency Care Network - a binational (Aus and NZ)  research network