British Columbia’s Index of Multiple Deprivation for Community Health Service Areas

Area-based socio-economic indicators, such as the Canadian Index of Multiple Deprivation (CIMD), have been used in equity analyses to inform strategies to improve needs-based, timely, and effective patient care and public health services to communities. The CIMD comprises four dimensions of deprivation: residential instability, economic dependency, ethno-cultural composition, and situational vulnerability. Using the CIMD methodology, the British Columbia Index of Multiple Deprivation (BCIMD) was developed to create indexes at the Community Health Services Area (CHSA) level in British Columbia (BC). BCIMD indexes are reported by quintiles, where quintile 1 represents the least deprived (or ethno-culturally diverse), and quintile 5 is the most deprived (or diverse). Distinctive characteristics of a community can be captured using the BCIMD, where a given CHSA may have a high level of deprivation in one dimension and a low level of deprivation in another. The utility of this data as a surveillance tool to monitor population demography has been used to inform decision making in healthcare by stakeholders in the regional health authorities and governmental agencies. The data have also been linked to health care data, such as COVID-19 case incidence and vaccination coverage, to understand the epidemiology of disease burden through an equity lens.