Overview

Abstract (English)

In Canada, the health care services are organized as health regions defined by each province so as to better meet the needs of each community. Because of the complexity of health care provision and the diversity of the population, organizing health care service provision by health regions makes a lot of sense; and as for an accountability, many are interested in which region is doing well on a certain health outcome measure, relative to the national average. However, most of existing reports on the regional measures of health outcomes do not adjust some of population characteristics, such as education levels and income levels, of the region. Hence, based on the relative measures to national averages of the health outcomes, the policy makers at the region level may reach a misleading conclusion and misuse resources to improve the situation. The contribution of this study is to estimate regional differences in health outcomes, conditional on the several regional characteristics using the Canadian Community Health Surveys (CCHS) from 2001 to 2010. Our preliminary results indicate that regions with younger and more educated individuals and more labour markets participants are healthier than the other regions.

Abstract (French)

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