Black Canadians have highest avoidable hospitalization rates: StatCan data
TORONTO - New data from Statistics Canada shows Black Canadians have had the highest rates of avoidable hospitalizations in the country — something experts say underscores the need for more equitable health services for the Black community.
A report released June 18 shows that over an eight-year period, Black Canadians were admitted to hospital for treatable health conditions such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension at higher rates than other racial groups and non-racialized people.
In the most recent data collected in 2023/2024, Black men and boys were admitted at a rate of 272 hospitalizations per 100,000 people while Black women and girls saw a rate of 253 per 100,000 people.
Other racialized people including South Asian, Chinese and Filipino Canadians had significantly lower rates. The lowest was among the Chinese population, in which men and boys had 65 hospitalizations per 100,000 people, and women and girls recorded 52 per 100,000 people.
Non-racialized people had the second-highest rate of avoidable hospital admissions in 2023, reaching 257 per 100,000 among men and 226 per 100,000 among women, the report states.
Notisha Massaquoi, an assistant professor of health education and promotion at the University of Toronto, says the data shines a light on the health equity crisis for Black Canadians who face significant barriers to primary care.
'(This is) a population that has experienced an enormous amount of racism in the health-care system,' said Massaquoi, who studies access to health-care services for Black Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area.
'There's a lack of trust in terms of going to a primary health-care setting or going to see a primary health-care provider, and when a community has experienced a lot of marginalization in the health-care system, what they do is avoid going until it's too late.'
Black Canadians might avoid seeking routine care because there is also a lack of Black health-care providers, said Massaquoi, noting better survival rates and health outcomes when a Black patient has a Black primary caregiver.
StatCan data shows that in 2023, the most updated information available, 72 per cent of Black Canadians had access to a primary health care provider. That's compared to 84 per cent of non-racialized Canadians.
The Canadian Medical Association says it doesn't keep track of the number of Black physicians in the country, but data published in 2020 by the Academic Medicine Journal — the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges — estimated that 2.3 per cent of practising physicians in Ontario were Black in 2018.
StatCan's report doesn't provide the specific reasons for hospitalizations, but a member of the senior leadership team at Women's College Hospital in Toronto says Black populations are disproportionately affected by chronic illnesses.
The reasons for that are complicated, said Dr. Cynthia Maxwell, a past-president of the Black Physicians Association of Ontario.
Maxwell said chronic illnesses can sometimes be traced to hurdles navigating the health-care system. Some Black communities also have fewer grocery store options, making access to nutritious food difficult, or are in areas more exposed to environmental toxins, which can lead to higher rates of respiratory problems.
Massaquoi and Maxwell both stressed the need for more Black health-care providers and Black-oriented clinics, saying many patients feel more comfortable visiting environments where there's less risk of racism.
Such an increase could also help train other doctors on the specific needs of Black patients.
'We will likely never have enough Black health-care providers to provide access to all Black community members, so it is important for all allies in the health system to engage in and learn about cultural safety and competencies that will help drive better health-care outcomes,' Maxwell said.
Maxwell linked less access to primary care to higher mortality rates of serious diseases, such as among Black women with breast and cervical cancer.
'We know Black women have less access to screening for conditions such as breast cancer and cervical cancer, which are major issues and have high morbidity and mortality in Black communities,' she said.
'A condition is identified typically in the primary care setting,' she said, noting that's where a patient is referred to a specialist for serious conditions.
Maxwell said it was important to collect better race-based patient data in order to identify issues unique to each community.
'Without the … race-specific data, you can't really get to the nuances of what the particular issues are within a community and what it means for a community to be disproportionately affected, either by a health condition or by the outcome of treatment for a health condition,' Maxwell said.
Massaquoi said Black health-care advocates have 'constantly' begged for better race-based data collection.
'What we want to see as members of the Black community are the interventions that are going to be developed and designed so we're no longer just getting this trauma type of data that keeps telling us over and over in every manner how badly we're doing.'
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2025.
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