Chronic diseases monitored

A provincewide initiative makes it easy to compare rates in different regions

Public-health-data nerds, as well as physicians and patients, have a new online tool to play with.

The Chronic Disease Dashboard was created by the B.C. Observatory for Population and Public Health to enable anyone with a computer to track the annual rates of more than 20 chronic diseases by geographic region and by sex across the province.

Are you interested in the “crude prevalence” rate of asthma for British Columbians aged one year or older in 2014-15? The online dashboard shows a rate of 9.28 per 100 in Richmond, compared to 10.58 per 100 in Vancouver and 15.09 per 100 in the eastern part of the Fraser Health region. This demonstrates a rate 63 percent higher in one part of the Fraser Valley than in the city of Richmond.

There was nearly as large a gap between these two areas in the crudeprevalence rate of people over the age of 20 at risk of being hospitalized for stroke that year. In Richmond, the rate was 0.74 per 100 in 2014-15. In the eastern part of the Fraser Health Authority that year, the rate was 1.15 per 100. The difference: 55 percent.

The B.C. Observatory for Population and Public Health is a partnership between the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, the B.C. Ministry of Health, the B.C. provincial health officer, the First Nations Health Authority, and the province’s six health authorities. The director is epidemiologist Kate Smolina, who is also an adjunct professor in UBC’S school of population and public health.

“One of our focuses is to make sure that we work together very collaboratively with our regional and provincial partners in the way we analyze data and share that information to support decision-making, policy development, and program planning,” Smolina told the Georgia Straight by phone. “Our initial focus is the chronic diseases.”

Other diseases listed on the dashboard include acute myocardial infarction, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia, angina, depression, episodic depression, diabetes, epilepsy, heart failure, and hypertension, to mention a few. One of the more alarming charts concerns the rate of crude incidence of people at risk for chronic kidney disease in B.C. It rose from 1.46 per thousand in 2000-01 to 4.15 per thousand in 2014-15.