Dahl L, Hnatiuk J, Prior HJ, McCulloch S, Koseva I, Soodeen R, Leggett S, McLean A, Bromley C, Nickel NC. Winnipeg MB: Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, 2026.

Mental health and substance use (MH/SU) disorders impact many people in a variety of ways throughout their lives. To help understand the volume of health services people use for an MH/SU disorder reason in Manitoba, this report describes the rates of visits to primary care providers, psychiatrists, emergency departments, and urgent centres, as well as hospitalizations in 2022/23. Additionally, the report examines where people went for these visits in relation to their home region as a measure of travel and also looks at the geographic regions of the patients that these providers serve. The results show that visit rates are highest for primary care providers, followed by psychiatrists, emergency departments, and then hospitals and urgent care centres. There is some travel involved for hospitalizations and emergency department visits, specifically for residents from the Southern, Northern, and Interlake-Eastern regions. This was also observed for primary care visits for MH/SU disorder reasons, where residents from those three regions more often made all of their visits to providers outside of their home region. Planning efforts should aim to improve access across the entire MH/SU disorder health system (i.e., including community supports and services) to ensure individuals are receiving the appropriate level of care they need. This, in turn, could lead to less reliance on more expensive care when not necessary and would be reflected in the rates used in this report.

Links:

• Full Report (PDF)
  Summary (PDF)
  

---

Comment on Social Media

---

A full list of MCHP Deliverables is available online.