Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Volume 17, Issue 23, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17238973
Keywords
health inequalities; spatial filters; early childhood; respiratory diseases
Funding
- Alberta Health Services Respiratory Health Strategic Clinical Network Research and Innovation Seed Grant [2019]
- Lois Hole Hospital for Women through the Women and Children's Health Research Institute
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research as a Canada Research Chair in Life Course, Social Environments and Health through the Government of Canada
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Young children are susceptible to respiratory diseases. Inequalities exist across socioeconomic groups for paediatric respiratory health services utilization in Alberta. However, the geographic distribution of those inequalities has not been fully explored. The aim of this study was to identify geographic inequalities in respiratory health services utilization in early childhood in Calgary and Edmonton, two major urban centres in Western Canada. We conducted a geographic analysis of data from a retrospective cohort of all singleton live births occurred between 2005 and 2010. We aggregated at area-level the total number of episodes of respiratory care (hospitalizations and emergency department visits) that occurred during the first five years of life for bronchiolitis, pneumonia, lower/upper respiratory tract infections, influenza, and asthma-wheezing. We used spatial filters to identify geographic inequalities in the prevalence of acute paediatric respiratory health services utilization in Calgary and Edmonton. The average health gap between areas with the highest and the lowest prevalence of respiratory health services utilization was 1.5-fold in Calgary and 1.4-fold in Edmonton. Geographic inequalities were not completely explained by the spatial distribution of socioeconomic status, suggesting that other unmeasured factors at the neighbourhood level may explain local variability in the use of acute respiratory health services in early childhood.
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