CIHI is out with their 2021 abortion numbers. They are now adjusting their numbers to use doctor's billing codes. That is good. But what is bad is that they are not including all of their previous stats.
"March 23, 2023 — Provision of abortion services in Canada has evolved in recent years. Since the medical abortion medication Mifegymiso became available in Canada in 2017, medical abortions have become increasingly accessible in non-hospital settings (e.g., nurse practitioner and physician offices, community and public health clinics). In addition, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have further shifted abortion services to non-hospital settings. As a result, reporting from traditional hospital data sources has led to an underestimation of the true number of induced abortions in Canada."
There are a lot of caveats to the 2021 data:
"Reporting enhancements
As part of CIHI’s ongoing improvement efforts, we explored opportunities to address data gaps, resulting in a revised methodology for reporting induced abortions for some jurisdictions in Canada. The methodology now includes physician billing data as the source of total abortion volumes and method of abortion for some provinces.
Because of the revised methodology, 2021 results are not comparable with historical data results. Restated 2020 abortion volumes using the revised methodology can be found in the notes to Table 1. The tables also contain information regarding data sources and coding methodology.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the total number of reported induced abortions larger than in previous years?
The number has increased due to changes in reporting methodology. More complete reporting for 5 provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia) is now sourced from physician billing data. Restated 2020 abortion volumes using the revised methodology can be found in the notes to Table 1.
Why were the reporting changes made now?
We enhanced the methodology as part of our ongoing efforts to improve completeness of reporting. The revised methodology better captures induced abortions, which are increasingly occurring in non-hospital settings (e.g., nurse practitioner and physician offices, community and public health clinics).
Why is the revised methodology used for some provinces only?
Due to variations in physician billing data capture and completeness across the country, it was not feasible to use the revised methodology for all jurisdictions; this has resulted in some ongoing underestimation of total abortion volumes. More comprehensive reporting may be available in future CIHI releases.
Do the results include the number of induced abortions from RU-486/mifepristone/Mifegymiso?
Reported volumes include abortions induced by Mifegymiso that occurred in a hospital, that were reported voluntarily by clinics or that were captured in the medical abortion physician billing codes. The data does not permit us to report these volumes separately because there is no unique code to identify Mifegymiso in the data sources. A high-level breakdown by method of abortion can be found in Table 3.
Why are there fewer data tables in the 2021 data release compared with previous years?
Breakdowns derived from hospitalization data only are no longer included since they are not representative of all abortions across all settings and represent only a small proportion of the total number of abortions."
So you can see that there is a lot of missing information from previous years:
- By Gestational age
- By number of previous deliveries
- By Number of previous abortions
- By complications
I had to do a fair amount of diddling with the report to get it to print properly, (formatting, etc) and haven't had time yet to review the actual data yet.
