Unmet Health Care Needs Among Older People in Canada: Does Household Food Insecurity Matter?

Background: Canada is undergoing a demographic shift, with projections indicating that over 25% of the country's population will be 65 years or older by 2063. While this has raised critical concerns about Canada's preparedness to meet the social and health-care needs of an aging population, the increasing incidence of food insecurity is particularly affecting vulnerable groups, such as older Canadians, with implications for their health-care service utilization. Despite this observation, there are nascent studies examining the role of household food insecurity status on unmet health-care needs among older people in Canada. The main objective of our study is to assess the association between household food insecurity and unmet health-care needs among older Canadians.

Methods: We used data from a selected sample of 21,178 participants as part of the 2017-18 Canadian Community Health Survey and applied logistic regression analysis.

Results: Our findings indicate that older people experiencing any type of food insecurity, that is, either moderate (OR=3.07, p<.01) or severe (OR=4.09, p<.01) were more likely to have reported unmet health-care needs compared to their counterparts in food secure households, even after controlling for a range of demographic, socioeconomic, and health and health-care variables. Our finding is concerning, considering that older people in Canada who are in most need of health-care services due to their food insecurity status are instead reporting unmet health-care needs.

Conclusion: This revelation calls for urgent policy attention to reduce the episodes of household food insecurity among older people in Canada. Specifically, to improve their access to health-care services, providing them with periodic grocery rebates as part of the social protection package for seniors in Canada would help mitigate the problem of food insecurity among them.