CCHE Seminar Series: Family Physician Entry and Healthcare Services Foot Traffic in Ontario

Family Physician Entry and Healthcare Services Foot Traffic in Ontario

Casey Chu
University of Toronto

Friday December 1, 2023, Zoom and HSB Rm. 740**

*Please note room change for this week*

Abstract: Family physicians are a critical component of the primary care system in Ontario as the first point of contact for health issues and gatekeeper to accessing diagnostic testing and specialist care. This study aimed to identify the effect of expanded access to family medicine in Ontario, Canada, in neighbourhoods on visits to ancillary health services. We examined the relationship between new physician entry in a neighbourhood (or dissemination area; DA) and foot traffic at ancillary services. We used Advan location data for 2021, which contains information on healthcare facilities and their weekly foot traffic and visit duration. We linked this data to practice addresses of family physicians from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario professional roster. With this linkage, we conducted an interrupted time series analysis centred around family physician entry into a DA and examined differences between different DA-level equity characteristics. New physician entry into a DA reduced the number of visits to non-physician mental health and outpatient care facilities in the short run but did not change the median duration of visits. We did not observe similar impacts across other categories of services, including hospital and emergency services; nor did we find significant differences across DA equity-related characteristics. Our findings show the potential for short-run substitution of services provided by non-physician mental health and outpatient care facilities. This preliminary analysis demonstrates a novel data linkage that could approximate the utilization of health services unavailable in current Ontarian administrative datasets.

Casey Chu (she/her) is a second year doctoral student in the Health Economics/Health Systems Research program at the Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation. Her research experiences have mainly focused on population and community health, with a particular emphasis on primary care and mental health services, both in Ontario and globally. In her doctoral studies, Casey will explore access to mental health services and its implications on the health system and the labour market, particularly for marginalized and underserved populations. Casey holds a Bachelor of Medical Sciences from Western University and a Master of Public Health in Health Policy from Yale University. The project she is presenting for this seminar is a collaboration with Dr. Alexander Hoagland, Assistant Professor at IHPME.