Term: Hospital Service Areas
Last Updated: 2007-09-26
Small geographic areas assigned to the hospital that provides the majority of residents' medical and surgical procedures. The areas may vary depending on the service being measured and are not necessarily congruent with provincially defined regions. These geographical areas are served primarily by a given rural hospital. They are defined based on patterns of use (all rural municipalities and local government districts) in which residents receive 30% (or 15% with a more lenient cut-off) of their hospital services from the target hospital or from a planning perspective (using RHA boundaries).