Health

Description: This infographic details the prevalence of vitamin D inadequacy among the Canadian population aged 3 to 79 by focusing on risk factors as well as behaviours that can reduce the likelihood of low vitamin D.

Description: Individuals who are nearing death report a preference to be cared for and to die outside of hospital. The reasons for this preference are complex and multifactorial. This study examined differences in the use of end-of-life acute care and the location of death among residents with dementia in rural long-term care homes, compared with those in urban long-term care homes, in Ontario, Canada.

Description: Mental health disparity is associated with diverse characteristics, such as gender, socioeconomic status, Indigenous identity, immigrant status, race, disability, and sexual orientation. However, intersectional studies on women’s mental health have been rare, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic period. To fill this research gap, this study examines women’s and girls’ self-reported mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic using seven characteristics, including Indigenous identity, immigrant status, racialized background, LGB+ sexual orientation, disability, and socioeconomic status (low income and unemployment).

Description:

Health Reports, published by the Health Analysis Division of Statistics Canada, is a peer-reviewed journal of population health and health services research. It is designed for a broad audience that includes health professionals, researchers, policymakers, and the general public. The journal publishes articles of wide interest that contain original and timely analyses of national or provincial/territorial surveys or administrative databases. New articles are published electronically each month.

Health Reports had an impact factor of 5.0 for 2022 and a five-year impact factor of 5.6. All articles are indexed in PubMed. Our online catalogue is free and receives more than 700,000 visits per year. External submissions are welcome.

Description: This article provides insights into the rates of COVID-19 mortality among First Nations peoples and Métis living in private dwellings and the social determinants of COVID-19 mortality among these populations using data from the 2016 Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohorts linked to the Canadian Vital Statistics – Death Database from 2016 to 2021.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Monthly indexes and percentage changes for selected sub-groups of the health and personal care component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), not seasonally adjusted, for Canada, provinces, Whitehorse and Yellowknife. Data are presented for the corresponding month of the previous year, the previous month and the current month. The base year for the index is 2002=100.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description:

In collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), this data file provides Canadians and researchers with preliminary data to monitor only the confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Canada. Given the rapidly-evolving nature of this situation, these data are considered preliminary.

Description: In collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), this table provides Canadians and researchers with preliminary data to monitor only the confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Canada. Given the rapidly-evolving nature of this situation, these data are considered preliminary. This table will provide an aggregate summary of the data available in the publication 13-26-0003.

Description: The public use microdata file (PUMF) from the Canadian Health Survey on Seniors (CHSS) provides data at the provincial level. Over the two-year period, data were collected from approximately 42,000 respondents aged 65 or older, residing in households in all provinces.

The file includes information on a wide range of topics, including oral health, care receiving, community service use, access to health care services, vaccines, smoking, alcohol consumption, general health, chronic health conditions and provides information on the socio-demographic characteristics of the population.

Note: The Canadian Health Survey on Seniors (CHSS) is a supplement to the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) - Annual component.

Description: The public use microdata file (PUMF) from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) provides data for health regions and combinations of health regions across Canada. Over the two year period, data are based on interviews with approximately 130,000 respondents aged 12 or older, residing in households in all provinces and territories.

The files include information on a wide range of topics, including: physical activity, height and weight, smoking, exposure to second hand smoke, alcohol consumption, general health, chronic health conditions, injuries, and use of health care services. It also provides information on the socio-demographic, income and labour force characteristics of the population.

Description: This dashboard allows users to examine data on barriers to accessibility experienced by persons with disabilities. These are barriers encountered in different aspects of daily living including those found in public spaces; communicating in different situations; using the Internet and barriers related to behaviours, misconceptions or assumptions by others. The data can be organized by province, gender and other characteristics such as age group. This dashboard is based on the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability.

Description: Differences in the number and proportions of persons with disabilities who experienced one or more barriers to accessibility, by the type of disability, age group and gender, Canada.

Description: Differences in the number and proportions of persons with disabilities who experienced one or more barriers to accessibility, by the severity of the disability, age group and gender, Canada.

Description: Differences in the number and proportions of persons with disabilities who experienced a barrier to accessibility, Canada, provinces and territories.

Description: This dashboard provides an interactive view of eight indicators from the Quality of Life Framework for Canada: Life satisfaction, sense of meaning and purpose, future outlook, loneliness, someone to count on, sense of belonging to local community, perceived mental health, and perceived health. The data can be organized by province, gender and other characteristics such as age group. This dashboard is based on quarterly data from the Canadian Social Survey.

Description: Percentage of persons aged 15 years and over by level of life satisfaction, by gender, for Canada, regions and provinces.

Description: Percentage of persons aged 15 years and over by level of life satisfaction, by gender and other selected sociodemographic characteristics: age group; immigrant status; visible minority group; Indigenous identity; persons with a disability, difficulty or long-term condition; LGBTQ2+ people; highest certificate, diploma or degree; main activity; and urban and rural areas.

Description: Percentage of persons aged 15 years and over by level of sense of meaning and purpose, by gender, for Canada, regions and provinces.

Description:

Despite advances that have improved the health of the United States population, disparities in health remain among various racial/ethnic and socio-economic groups. Common data sources for assessing the health of a population of interest include large-scale surveys that often pose questions requiring a self-report, such as, "Has a doctor or other health professional ever told you that you have health condition of interest?" Answers to such questions might not always reflect the true prevalences of health conditions (for example, if a respondent does not have access to a doctor or other health professional). Similarly, self-reported data on quantities such as height and weight might be subject to reporting errors. Such "measurement error" in health data could affect inferences about measures of health and health disparities. In this work, we fit measurement-error models to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which asks self-report questions during an interview component and also obtains physical measurements during an examination component. We then develop methods for using the fitted models to improve on analyses of self-reported data from another survey that does not include an examination component. The methods, which involve multiply imputing examination-based data values for the survey that has only self-reported data, are applied to the National Health Interview Survey in examples involving diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Preliminary results suggest that the adjustments for measurement error can result in non-negligible changes in estimates of measures of health.

Description:

The U.S. Survey of Occupational Illnesses and Injuries (SOII) is a large-scale establishment survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure incidence rates and impact of occupational illnesses and injuries within specified industries at the national and state levels. This survey currently uses relatively simple procedures for detection and treatment of outliers. The outlier-detection methods center on comparison of reported establishment-level incidence rates to the corresponding distribution of reports within specified cells defined by the intersection of state and industry classifications. The treatment methods involve replacement of standard probability weights with a weight set equal to one, followed by a benchmark adjustment.

One could use more complex methods for detection and treatment of outliers for the SOII, e.g., detection methods that use influence functions, probability weights and multivariate observations; or treatment methods based on Winsorization or M-estimation. Evaluation of the practical benefits of these more complex methods requires one to consider three important factors. First, severe outliers are relatively rare, but when they occur, they may have a severe impact on SOII estimators in cells defined by the intersection of states and industries. Consequently, practical evaluation of the impact of outlier methods focuses primarily on the tails of the distributions of estimators, rather than standard aggregate performance measures like variance or mean squared error. Second, the analytic and data-based evaluations focus on the incremental improvement obtained through use of the more complex methods, relative to the performance of the simple methods currently in place. Third, development of the abovementioned tools requires somewhat nonstandard asymptotics the reflect trade-offs in effects associated with, respectively, increasing sample sizes; increasing numbers of publication cells; and changing tails of underlying distributions of observations.

Description:

The Canadian Community Health Survey consists of two cross-sectional surveys conducted on an alternating annual cycle. Both surveys collect general health information, while the second smaller survey collects additional information on survey specific health issues. Even with the large sample sizes, users are interested in combining the cycles of the CCHS to improve the quality of the estimates, create estimates for small geographical domains, or to estimate for rare characteristics or populations. This paper will focus on some of the issues related to combining cycles of the CCHS including some possible interpretations of the combined result. Possible methods to combine cycles will also be outlined.

Description:

The Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) represents Statistics Canada's first health survey employing a comprehensive battery of direct physical measurements of health. The CHMS will be collecting directly measured health data on a representative sample of 5000 Canadians aged 6 to 79 in 2007 to 2009. After a comprehensive in-home health interview, respondents report to a mobile examination centre where direct health measures are performed. Measures include fitness tests, anthropometry, objective physical activity monitoring, spirometry, blood pressure measurements, oral health measures and blood and urine sampling. Blood and urine are analyzed for measures of chronic disease, infectious disease, nutritional indicators and environmental biomarkers. This survey has many unique and peculiar challenges rarely experienced by most Statistics Canada surveys; some of these challenges are described in this paper. The data collected through the CHMS is unique and represents a valuable health surveillance and research resource for Canada.

Description:

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) has been conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics for over forty years. The survey collects information on the health and nutritional status of the United States population using in-person interviews and standardized physical examinations conducted in mobile examination centers. During the course of these forty years, numerous lessons have been learned about the conduct of a survey using direct physical measures. Examples of these "lessons learned" are described and provide a guide for other organizations and countries as they plan similar surveys.

Description:

In Finland the first national health examination surveys were carried out in the 1960s. Comprehensive surveys of nationally representative population samples have been carried out in 1978 to 1980 (The Mini-Finland Health Survey) and in 2000 to 2001 (Health 2000). Surveys of cardiovascular risk factors, so called FinRisk surveys, have assessed their trends every five years. The health examination surveys are an important tool of health monitoring, and, linked with registers also a rich source of data for epidemiological research. The paper also gives examples on reports published from several of these studies.

Description:

Health services research generally relies on observational data to compare outcomes of patients receiving different therapies. Comparisons of patient groups in observational studies may be biased, in that outcomes differ due to both the effects of treatment and the effects of patient prognosis. In some cases, especially when data are collected on detailed clinical risk factors, these differences can be controlled for using statistical or epidemiological methods. In other cases, when unmeasured characteristics of the patient population affect both the decision to provide therapy and the outcome, these differences cannot be removed using standard techniques. Use of health administrative data requires particular cautions in undertaking observational studies since important clinical information does not exist. We discuss several statistical and epidemiological approaches to remove overt (measurable) and hidden (unmeasurable) bias in observational studies. These include regression model-based case-mix adjustment, propensity-based matching, redefining the exposure variable of interest, and the econometric technique of instrumental variable (IV) analysis. These methods are illustrated using examples from the medical literature including prediction of one-year mortality following heart attack; the return to health care spending in higher spending U.S. regions in terms of clinical and financial benefits; and the long-term survival benefits of invasive cardiac management of heart attack patients. It is possible to use health administrative data for observational studies provided careful attention is paid to addressing issues of reverse causation and unmeasured confounding.

Description:

Most major survey research organizations in the United States and Canada do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dialed (RDD) household telephone surveys. In this paper, we offer the most up-to-date estimates available from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics and Statistics Canada concerning the prevalence and demographic characteristics of the wireless-only population. We then present data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey on the health and health care access of wireless-only adults, and we examine the potential for coverage bias when health research is conducted using RDD surveys that exclude wireless telephone numbers.

Description:

In an effort to increase response rates and decrease costs, many survey operations have begun to use several modes to collect relevant data. While the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a multipurpose household health survey conducted annually by the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is primarily a face-to-face survey, interviewers also rely on the telephone to complete some interviews. This has raised questions about the quality of resulting data. To address these questions, data from the 2005 NHIS are used to analyze the impact of mode on eight key health indicators.

Description:

Many population surveys collecting food consumption data use 24 hour recall methodology to capture detailed one day intakes. In order to estimate longer term intakes of foods and nutrients from these data, methods have been developed that required a repeat recall to be collected from at least a subset of responders in order to estimate day to day variability. During the Canadian Community Health Survey Cycle 2.2 Nutrition Focus Survey, most first interviews were collected in person and most repeat interviews were conducted by telephone. This paper looks at the impact of the mode of interview on the reported foods and nutrients on both the first day and the repeat day and on the estimation of intra individual variability between the first and the second interviews.

Description: The data will be used by Health Canada, the Health Promotion Directorate as well as Researchers for alcohol and other drug use in Canada. Information will be used to inform the decision making and program planning efforts of policy makers, practitioners and researchers.

Description: The main purpose of this survey is to collect data to monitor cigarette smoking in Canada and attempt to measure the effect of cigarette price reductions on smoking behaviour.

Description: The results from this survey will be used to develop new programs to educate and inform the public, and to determine the need for new services.

Description: The main objective of the survey is to provide continual and reliable data on tobacco, alcohol and drug use and related issues, with the primary focus on 15 to 24 year olds.

Description: The two primary objectives of the General Social Survey (GSS) are: to gather data on social trends in order to monitor changes in the living conditions and well being of Canadians over time; and to provide information on specific social policy issues of current or emerging interest. The purpose of this survey is to provide a snapshot of the lives of caregivers and care receivers in today's Canada.

Description: The objective of the survey was to provide information on the experiences of respondents in using some selected health care services. The survey focused on two main topics: waiting for specialized services for a new illness or condition and access to basic health care.

Description: The NPHS Health Institutions Component survey data support national level estimates only.

Description: The National Population Health Survey (NPHS) collects information related to the health of the Canadian population and related socio-demographic information.

Description: The purpose of the Canadian Community Health Survey - Mental Health (CCHS - Mental Health) is to collect information about mental health status, access to and perceived need for formal and informal services and supports, functioning and disability, and covariates.

Description: The Maternity Experiences Survey (MES) is the first Canadian survey devoted to pregnancy, labour, birth and postpartum experiences. It is a core project of the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System of the Public Health Agency of Canada who sponsored this survey.