Ontario’s Health Quality Council has just released a new report on Health Equity in northern Ontario that shows that Ontario’s northern
regions lag behind provincial averages in quality of health and health
care. The geographic focus of the
report is on the area that “extends north of Lake Huron to Hudson Bay and James Bay,
and from the Quebec border in the east to the Manitoba border in the west,
which represent nearly 80% of Ontario’s landmass.” If you do not want to read the report, there is a pretty
good overview in the Globe and Mail.
While northern Ontario has seen health gains over time, it
remains that the gap in health indicators between the north and the south is
growing and it may be worse than the report suggests because the report’s data
is drawn from Statistics Canada’s Community Health Survey, which does not cover
Indigenous people living on reserves.
As it stands, the relative gap in mortality rates has grown to 30
percent in 2012 from a 12-17 percent range in 1992. In 2012, the age standardized mortality rate per 1,000
people was 5.7 in the northwest, 5.7 in the northeast and 4.4 in Ontario.
People in the North West LHIN region have a life expectancy
of 78.6 years, compared to 81.5 years in Ontario. People in the North East LHIN
region also have a markedly lower life expectancy than Ontario overall, of 79.0
years, or 2.5 years shorter than the Ontario average. The North West LHIN
region has nearly double Ontario’s number of potential years of life lost due to
avoidable deaths, at 6,023 years lost per 100,000 people over a two-year
period, compared to 3,243 years per 100,000 people in Ontario. The North East
LHIN region also has considerably higher potential years of life lost due to
avoidable deaths than Ontario, at 4,763 years per 100,000 people. People in
northern Ontario are more likely to die prematurely due to suicide, circulatory
and respiratory disease.
The reasons for these differences are complex. The north is a sparsely populated
region and the vast differences make it difficult to deliver the same level of
care one might get in Toronto to smaller isolated communities. There are also lifestyle factors such
as higher smoking, drinking and obesity rates in the north. For example, the self-reported smoking
rate was 26.0% in the North East LHIN region and 22.9% in the North West LHIN
region, compared to 17.3% in Ontario.
However, access is also still an an issue. According to the report: “People in the north are less likely than
Ontarians as a whole to report having a family doctor, nurse practitioner or
other regular health care provider – 89.2% of people in the North East LHIN
region and 83.8% in the North West LHIN region, compared to 93.8% of people in
Ontario.” The Globe and Mail
story quotes NDP health critic Frances Gélinas as saying that part of the blame
for health-quality gaps between the north and south lies with the Liberal
government’s move to concentrate health services and surgeries in “centres of
excellence” in big cities in the south.
To that, let me add the following anecdotal
observation. Its not just
centralization in the south that may be affecting access to health care in
northern Ontario but also concentration of health services and facilities
within the north’s few major urban centers themselves. Take the case of Thunder Bay since the
new centralized hospital and new medical school were put into place over a decade ago, there has been a
steady migration of health services and facilities to the area around the new hospital
on the north side of the city. Indeed,
even the Fort William Clinic is now technically in what used to be the old City
of Port Arthur. Twenty years ago,
hospitals, diagnostic facilities and clinics appeared to be much more
dispersed across the city’s two north-south population clusters.
I would like to see a study of if there has been any impact
on access to medical services and access particularly for those on the south
side of the city to physician visits and diagnostic tests. Especially, how have seniors with
limited mobility and lower income people on the south side continued to access physician
appointments and tests. Do they
have a higher rate of cancellation?
Would the south side benefit from having an Urgent Care Access Center
like the types that have been springing up in southern Ontario cities? Perhaps
there has been no change but I would like to see some evidence based results
because my gut feeling is that it is much harder to access care even in the
north’s larger urban centers and the result is fewer people going to see
doctors and getting tests. Moreover, those most likely to not make it to the doctor may be among more vulnerable populations. However, gut feelings are
not enough to make policy. We need evidence.