Where to find health statistics for BC

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 64, No. 5, June 2022, Page 231 College Library
By: Chris Vriesema-Magnuson

Health statistics are integral to making the best decisions for health care, whether at the individual or community level. Here are a few places to start your search for health statistics [Box].

Where to find health statistics for BC

The BC Centre for Disease Control offers data on many diseases, including several dashboards that allow interaction with data on such things as chronic diseases and reportable diseases, displayed by several criteria (over time, by gender, by health area). This is where you want to go if you’re wondering about the measles infection rate for Southern Vancouver Island.

BC health authorities may offer statistics such as education levels, overall population health, provider availability in the community, or prevalence of certain conditions. The Provincial Health Services Authority supplies access to the BC Community Health Atlas. The atlas allows for investigation and manipulation of data, such as the number of incident cases of hypertension by local health area.

Topic-specific research and advocacy organizations and centres often collect data at a highly detailed level for particular health conditions or populations. The British Columbia Centre on Substance Use offers data and clinical advice from its various research projects, such as analyses of risk-mitigation services in the context of COVID-19 and the opioid epidemic. The Health Equity Collaborative’s report contains valuable information about health barriers for sexual- and gender-diverse people.

Health statistics are also hiding among other data at BC Statistics, including rates and causes of fatalities. Beyond BC, provincial data can often be found in national reports, such as those from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Happy hunting!
—Chris Vriesema-Magnuson
Librarian

hidden

This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Chris Vriesema-Magnuson. Where to find health statistics for BC. BCMJ, Vol. 64, No. 5, June, 2022, Page(s) 231 - College Library.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply