The care of critically ill people in Intensive Care Units is a large and expensive part of health care. Each year, over two per cent of older Manitobans experience a critical illness.

Twenty per cent of Canadians live in rural areas. Compared to urban residents, they are thought to face additional barriers to obtaining health care and to have worse outcomes from illness. Such problems are likely even greater for those with critical illnesses. But little is actually known about rural versus urban disparities in care of critically ill people.

We will use data at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy to study how living in rural Manitoba impacts access to care and clinical outcomes for patients with one of two important types of critical illness – COVID-19 pneumonia, and sepsis, which is organ failure due to infection (a common type of critical illness).

We hypothesize that rural residents will have higher rates of hospital admission, but lower rates of ICU admission due to lack of ICU care in rural areas. For patients who make it to the ICU, we anticipate that the rural residents will have higher mortality.

This work is important, because before those who make health care policy decisions can work to remove the disparities, they first need to understand them.