Health Care Utilization by Canadian Women

HEALTH ISSUES: While women are reported to be more frequent users of health services in Canada, differences in women's and men's health care utilization have not been fully explored. To provide an overview on women's healthcare utilization, we selected two key issues that are important for public policy purposes: access to care and patterns of utilization. These issues are examined using primarily data from the 1998/99 National Population Health Survey, complemented by the 2000 Canadian Community Health Survey and the 2001 Health Service Access Survey. KEY FINDINGS: • Women are twice as likely as men to report a regular family physician, but that proportion is very low (15.8%). • Women report significantly shorter specialist wait times (20.9 days) than men (55.4 days) for mental health, while the reverse is true for asthma and other breathing conditions (10.8 for men, 78.8 for women). • Reported mean wait times are significantly lower for men than for women pertaining to overall diagnostic tests: for MRI, 70.3 days for women compared to 29.1 days for men. DATA GAPS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: • Measurement of possible system bias and its implication for equitable and quality healthcare for women requires larger provincial samples of the national surveys, along with a longitudinal design. • Either a national database on preventive services, or better alignment of provincial databases pertaining to health promotion and preventive services, is needed to facilitate data linkage with national surveys to undertake longitudinal studies that support gender based analyses.