Ottawa, ON, June 24, 2024 – Long-term care residents whose primary language was a language other than English and French were less likely to visit the emergency department, be hospitalized or die when their family doctor spoke their language, according to new research from ICES.
Research has established that patients who face language barriers in the healthcare system often struggle to access services and receive care that is of lower quality and safety.
Published in BMJ Public Health, a new study examines whether these disparities can be attributed to language barriers. In a cohort of almost half a million people receiving home care services between 2010 and 2018 in Ontario, Canada, researchers defined "language concordance" as a patient who received primary care from a family physician who spoke their language.
While the risk of emergency department (ED) visits, hospitalizations and mortality decreased for Allophones—people speaking a language other than English or French—when they received language-concordant care, outcomes were no different for Francophones.
"Interestingly, outcomes for Francophones were not impacted by whether they received language-concordant or language-discordant primary care," says Michael Reaume, resident physician in internal medicine at the University of Manitoba. "We think that the finding is because sixty-one percent of Francophones in the study did in fact receive care from French-speaking family doctors."
"This means that relatively fewer Francophones were at risk of experiencing poor outcomes. For me, this suggests that policies such as the French Language Services Act have been successful at facilitating access to language-concordant care for the Franco-Ontarian population."
Key findings:
