Objectives Language-concordant care, or healthcare in one’s preferred language, is important both for health equity and for improving health outcomes. Linguistic minorities, like Francophones in Ontario, Canada, are at risk of poorer clinical outcomes if they receive non-language-concordant primary care.
However, common ratio-based access measures can provide misleading views of minorities’ actual access levels. This cross-sectional geospatial study demonstrates a new way to measure primary care access using average travel time to the nearest five English- and French-speaking family physicians.
We also introduce the concept of primary care access fragility, where a region’s primary care access may depend on one or a few local family physicians. Our research question is: are there differences in travel burden and access fragility for census subdivisions (CSDs) across language (English/French), rurality (urban/rural) and region (north/south) in the province of Ontario, Canada?
Design We conducted a cross-sectional geospatial analysis to estimate English-language and French-language primary care travel burdens and access fragility in Ontario, Canada.
BMJ Open published a clinical update in Research Highlights on 03 Apr 2026.
The item focuses on Going the distance: a cross-sectional geospatial analysis quantifying province-wide inequities in travel-based access, and fragility of access to French-language primary care provided by family physicians in Ontario, Canada.
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