Health An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health Illness and Medicine· 2026Q2
Adapting to scarcity: Plasticity in rural healthcare practice
- 1citations
- Q2SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Rural healthcare teams adapt to resource scarcity through "plasticity," a flexible shifting of roles and tasks, which can be both empowering (acute) and lead to burnout (chronic).
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Key points
- Rural healthcare teams use "plasticity" (flexible role/task shifting) to manage resource scarcity.
- Two forms of plasticity were identified: acute (short-term, high-stakes) and chronic (long-term).
- Acute plasticity was often empowering, while chronic plasticity led to stress and burnout.
- Plasticity is enabled by informal learning and community responsibility but lacks formal institutional support.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Rural healthcare practitioners face persistent challenges such as limited staffing, geographic isolation, and broad scopes of responsibility. These conditions require constant adaptation to ensure care delivery. This study introduces plasticity as a conceptual lens for understanding how rural healthcare teams collectively navigate scarcity through flexible role and task shifting. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory, we conducted 19 interviews with nurses and physicians in emergency departments in two rural communities in Ontario, Canada, to explore how plasticity functions in rural healthcare teams. The analysis refined and extended the concept of plasticity by identifying two variations of plasticity: acute (short-term, high-stakes task switching or role expansion) and chronic (long-term role expansion), alongside four interrelated dimensions that characterize this phenomenon in rural settings. While acute plasticity was often empowering, chronic plasticity, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to cumulative stress, burnout, and professional demoralization. Our analysis illustrates that plasticity is both a strength and vulnerability in rural healthcare work, enabled through informal learning and relational responsibility to community, yet largely unsupported by formal institutional structures.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Health An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health Illness and Medicine, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Emergency Medical Services
Emergency Medical ServicesHealth Professions