A quarter of Canadians over 45 struggled to access health care in 2020: survey
CTV
A quarter of Canadians over 45 experienced challenges accessing health-care services during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to survey results published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) this month.
A quarter of Canadians over 45 experienced challenges accessing health-care services during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to survey results published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) this month.
However, the degree to which people were affected depended on factors like race, immigration status, sex, age and education and income levels.
As COVID-19 spread in 2020, health-care providers coped with the strain of patients sick with the virus by cancelling elective surgeries and in-person appointments and turning more to virtual care. Nationally, emergency department visits and inpatient admission levels dropped by 24 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Home and primary care services were also affected.
In order to understand how these disruptions affected older Canadians and their health-care needs in 2020, researchers from McMaster University, McGill University, Dalhousie University and the Public Health Agency of Canada surveyed 23, 972 people between April 15 and Dec. 29, 2020, about their experiences accessing health care.
What they found was that the level of difficulty respondents faced accessing health care varied widely based on a range of social determinants.
"Substantial unmet health-care needs were reported by Canadian adults during the first year of the pandemic," the authors wrote in the CMAJ paper on Feb. 14 that outlined the results of the survey. "The results of this study have important implications for health equity."
From September to December 2020, 25 per cent of survey respondents experienced challenges accessing health-care services, eight per cent did not go to a hospital or see a doctor when they needed to and four per cent faced barriers to testing for COVID-19 infection.
