Patients across Ontario should expect to receive excellent care from our health system. And it usually delivers. But in too many instances, the quality of care people receive can vary depending on where they live.
For example, people with a diagnosis of heavy menstrual bleeding living in the northeast are more than ten times as likely to receive a hysterectomy as people living in Toronto. Similarly, people hospitalized with a hip fracture have a likelihood of dying within 30 days of admission that varies from 3% to 16% across the 50 highest volume hospitals in the province.
Some variation in care is always to be expected because of differences in patients’ underlying health conditions or in their treatment preferences. However, wide unwarranted regional variations in practices and outcomes are often a symptom of a system that lacks focus. Several decades ago, renowned health services researcher Dr. John E. Wennberg and colleagues at the Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice in the US determined that such regional variations point to a lack of “evidence-based standards of practice”.