Concurrent Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders among Frequent Emergency Department Users in Saskatchewan, Canada

Creating an 11-year longitudinal substance use harm cohort from linked health and census data to analyze social drivers of health

“…We compared our cohort with two others designed to study substance use harm in British Columbia 12 and Saskatchewan. 13 The comparison was primarily aimed at understanding the potential advantages and challenges of using CanCHECs, as in our study, versus using provincial data repositories, as was the approach in the BC 12 and SK 13 cohorts, in creating longitudinal cohorts for studying substance use harm.…”

“…This allows an in-depth analysis of disparities in substance use harm based on factors such as income, education, occupation, language, self-identified ethnicity, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, and immigration status, among others. 15 Such linkage is not possible with cohorts exclusively using provincial data repositories, as seen with the BC 12 and SK 13 cohorts.…”

“…There have been efforts to create provincial cohorts to delve into substance use harm in regions like British Columbia 12 and Saskatchewan. 13 However, these studies had limited ability to provide socio-economic insights due to the absence of linked health data to social information. However, this gap in the information can be addressed by using the rich national databases, such as the Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohorts (CanCHECs), accessible at Research Data Centres (RDC) 14 throughout the country.…”

“…The main objective of this study is to create, describe, and validate a substance use cohort of Saskatchewanians, developed using CanCHEC. To validate this cohort, we compared our descriptive findings against those from previous studies on substance use in Canada, such as the British Columbia 12 and Saskatchewan 13 substance use cohorts. The second objective was to highlight the potential CanCHEC holds for a micro-level linkage of socioeconomic and ethnocultural data to health administrative data.…”