About Health Indicators

Background
Health indicators framework
Health regions
Health region peer groups

Background

In response, Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and Statistics Canada launched a collaborative process to identify what measures should be used to report on health and the health system -- and then to share this information with Canadians from coast to coast.

Health indicators are

• relevant to established health goals
  
• based on standard (comparable) definitions and methods
  
• broadly available - disseminated electronically across Canada at the regional, provincial and national level.

The primary goal of the Health Indicators project is to support health regions in monitoring progress in improving and maintaining the health of the population and the functioning of the health system for which they are responsible through the provision of quality, comparative information on

• the overall health of the population served, how it compares with other regions in the province and country, and how it is changing over time;
  
• the major non-medical determinants of health in the region;
  
• the health services received by the region's residents; and
  
• characteristics of the community or the health system.

Consultations continue with provincial and regional health authorities to refine and expand the initial list of indicators confirmed at a consensus conference in May 1999. As data are compiled, the provincial and regional authorities are also involved in the verification process. This collaborative process is intended to ensure relevant data and consistent methods.

Health indicators framework

The health indicators framework (PDF) describes the current indicators, categories and dimensions. The indicators in this issue include all those released in Health Indicators Volume 2000, No.1, and Volume 2001 No's. 1 and 2 (updated or revised, where applicable), in addition to a number of other indicators -- see "What's New" for more details.

Certain current indicators have no data available at this time, but work is being done to have these data ready for future issues.

Health regions

Health regions are defined by provincial governments as the areas of responsibility for regional health boards (i.e., legislated) or as regions of interest to health care authorities.

The following table presents an overview of health regions in Canada, by province and territory and links to maps (jpeg or pdf) for viewing current boundaries:

List of health regions by province/territory (PDF)

(1) In PEI, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, the legislated health regions have relatively small populations. In order to produce reliable and comparable health indicators, these provinces have defined health regions for statistical purposes. In PEI, the two health regions divide the province into an ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ component and bear no resemblance to the five administrative health regions. In Nova Scotia, these are known as ‘health zones’ and relate to the province’s administrative health region boundaries. In Saskatchewan, ‘service areas’ have been created from groupings of the 33 health districts.

(2) Public health units (PHU) administer health promotion and disease prevention programs. District health councils (DHC) are advisory, health planning organizations that make recommendations on resource distribution and provide advice on integration of health services in their community.

Health region peer groups

There is a growing need to effectively compare health regions with similar socio-economic determinants of health. In order to address this need, the health regions have been grouped into peer groups. A "Peer Group" can be defined as a cluster of health regions that have similar social and economic health determinants.

A statistical method was used to assign health regions to peer groups. In order to achieve maximum statistical differentiation between health regions, 24 variables were chosen to cover as many of the social and economic determinants of health as possible. This was accomplished using data collected at the health region level mostly from the 1996 Census of Canada. Concepts covered include

• basic demographics (i.e., population change and demographic structure),
  
• living conditions (i.e., socio-economic characteristics, housing, and income inequality), and
  
• working conditions (i.e., labour market conditions)

Empirical techniques were employed when grouping health regions into peer groups and the final result is a set of ten peer groups (Peer Groups A through J) ranging in size from 5 to 34 health regions with membership crossing provincial boundaries. When mapped there are some apparent trends; large regional centres appear to split out into peer groups based on their size and the health regions surrounding these regional centres tend to group together. Further, there are some associations based on their geography in relationship to the east and west coasts as well as southern and northern Canada.

A more detailed discussion on the rationale and methods involved in the development of peer groups is available as a working paper.

Health Region Peer Groups (PDF)

List of health regions by peer group (PDF)

Tab-delimited list of health regions by peer group (TXT)

Health region by peer group map (PDF)

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