Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders among the elderly population is high and expected to increase in the next decade. Annually, more than a third of Canadians aged 65 years and over will seek primary care services for such conditions. Elderly patients with musculoskeletal disorders benefit from early physiotherapy. However, access to publicly funded physiotherapy services in Canada is limited by long waiting times. Moreover, variability in resource allocation may result in geographic disparities in service provision, thus compromising equity in access. This presentation will show the variations in demand and provision of publicly funded outpatient physiotherapy services across the province of Quebec (Canada) and the analysis of the demand to provision relationship. The data used for this study was retrieved from the 2008 Quebec Health Survey and from a survey of outpatient physiotherapy services in Quebec's hospitals in 2015. The results indicate wide variations between health regions across the province. The demand, estimated by the proportion of Quebec's population living in lower-income households and who had an MSD, varied from 4.9% to 9.0%. The provision varied from 1.3 to 42.1 physiotherapy clinicians per 100,000 population. The variations in service provision did not match the variations in demand. Long waiting times were reported in many regions, ranging from 1.43 to 12.44 months across the province. In conclusion, this study indicates marked variations in provision of physiotherapy services between regions that do not correspond to the variations in demand. These geographic disparities should be addressed in order to provide equitable and timely access to physiotherapy services.