Health Reports
A Canadian peer-reviewed journal of population health and health services research
March 2024
Exploring the use of experimental small area estimates to examine the relationship between individual-level and area-level community belonging and self-rated health
by Sarah M. Mah, Mark Brown, Rachel C. Colley, Laura C. Rosella, Grant Schellenberg and Claudia Sanmartin
As the importance of subjective well-being to health continues to garner increasing attention from researchers and policy makers, community belonging—the degree to which individuals hold a sense of belonging and attachment to their local community—has emerged as a potential population health target that has been linked to several self-rated measures of health and well-being in Canada. Community belonging is thought to influence health through a number of avenues, which can include psychosocial pathways, such as self-esteem and stress, social cognitive mechanisms that involve the transmission of social norms and attitudes related to health behaviours, and the availability of and access to material and social resources via social connections and social capital. Despite the known geographic variation of community belonging, comparatively less work has been done to investigate whether, and to what extent, community belonging, at the level of local neighbourhoods, affects self-rated general health. In other words, the extent to which one’s sense of belonging might reflect a “compositional” property (i.e., the sense of belonging of individuals who live in a given neighbourhood) versus a characteristic that marks a neighbourhood’s “context” (the existing resources and structures that foster belonging) or “collective social function” (the shared sociocultural norms, values, and history of residents) has not been explored.
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Exploring the use of experimental small area estimates to examine the relationship between individual-level and area-level community belonging and self-rated health
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Access to specialized health care services among older Canadians
by Md Kamrul Islam and Heather Gilmour
Canada is experiencing rapid population aging. The aging of Canada’s population is mostly driven by aging baby boomers, increasing life expectancy, and decreasing fertility. In 2021, 18.5% of the population was aged 65 years or older, an increase from 13.0% in 2001. By 2030, this is projected to reach between 21.4% and 23.4% of the population. Older people are more likely to have multiple and complex health conditions and, in 2020, accounted for 44% of health expenditures in Canada. Thus, health care use, including specialist care use, would be expected to increase in the future.
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