| Summary: | Most mental health (MH) care in Canada is provided by General Practitioners
(GPs). Thus. information about use of primary MI-I care is fundamentally important to
researchers and policy makers. The two predominant sources of data on primary MN
care are self-reported data, and provincial administrative databases which capture
physician reimbursement data for medical services provided to virtually all residents,
under Canada’s publicly-funded universal health care system. The objective of this
research was to compare estimates of primary MI-I care from the two types of data over a
12 month reference period, using an individual-level data linkage in a sample of 2,37X
residents of the province of British Columbia.
The proportion of individuals in this sample who had MI-I care from a GP was
approximately twice as high in the administrative data (19.3%) versus the self-reported
data (8.5%). in contrast, the number o/ A4H visits to each individual’s main GP tended to
be higher in the self-reported data than the administrative data. In terms of agreement.
three-quarters of individuals who had primary MH care according to the administrative
data did not report such care. while one-third of individuals who reported primary Mu
care did not have an administrative record of such care. The study also explored whether
individuals in the sample who had had a major depressive episode (MDE) in the 12
month reference period, were more or less likely than individuals who had not had an
MDE to have had primary MI-I care according to both data sources versus only one data
source. The results of the study indicated that individuals who had hat/an A/IDE had a
greater likelihood of having had care according to both data sources.
The self-reported data were from the 2002 Canadian Community I-Health Survey
on Mental Health and Well-Being, and the method used to identify primary MI-I care in
the administrative data closely paralleled the method that has recently been proposed for
national surveillance of MH in Canada. It is hoped that the findings will help
researchers, policymakers and methodologists to make informed choices when collecting.
analyzing and interpreting each type of data.
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