Access to Care and Travel Burden by Language

While language concordance between patients and primary care physicians results in better quality of care and health outcomes for patients, little research has been done to measure inequities in travel burden to primary care physicians for linguistic minorities in Canada. This study, conducted in collaboration with members of the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study, measured travel burden for all residents in Ottawa, Ontario to primary care physicians (family physicians in community practice), and compared it to the travel burden for French-only speakers to language-concordant primary care. Our results indicate that there are neighbourhood-level travel burden inequities for official language minorities in Ottawa, ON. These inequities are generally smaller, however, in neighbourhoods with a larger proportion of French-only speakers. Our methods use open-sourced data and algorithms and can be replicated for other geographical regions in Canada.