The health services use among older Canadians in rural and urban areas

THE HEALTH SERVICES USE AMONG OLDER CANADIANS IN RURAL AND URBAN AREAS # Heather Conde and James Ted McDonald Department of Economics, University of New Brunswick, Canada Abstract Even though universal health care is one of the fundamental pillars of Canadian society, the rising cost of all services has resulted in the relocation and redistribution of funding and services between rural and urban a [...] Similar conclusions were drawn in the Kirby Report that noted access issues were the most serious problems for residents of rural and remote areas, and also that the health of rural residents was worse than their urban counterparts.1 Even though universal health care is one of the fundamental pillars of Canadian society, the rising cost of all services has resulted in the relocation and redistribu [...] A number of authors have studied access and use of health 2 The effect of rationalization of service provision in rural areas depends on community and government responses to the changes and does not necessarily worsen the health status of residents of the affected community. [...] Second, are any of the differences in health services use identified in the first part of the analysis due to differences in the socio-economic and demographic characteristics and/or the health status of each region’s residents?5 We focus on older Canadians as on average they are in greater need of health services than younger people, and so any barriers to the use of necessary health services tha [...] As well, we experiment with the inclusion of controls at the level of the health region: a full set of indicator variables for health region of residence (which can be identified owing to the fact that many health regions span both rural and urban areas) and alternatively variables measuring the number of general practitioners and the number of specialists per 1000 population in each health region