A Surveillance System to Monitor Excess Mortality of People with Mental Illness in Canada

Objective:Outcome measures are rarely available for surveillance and system performance monitoring for mental disorders and addictions. Our study aims to demonstrate the feasibility and face validity of routinely measuring the mortality gap in the Canadian context at the provincial and regional levels using the methods and data available to the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS) of the Public Health Agency of Canada.Methods:We used longitudinal data from the Quebec Integrated Chronic Disease Surveillance System, which also provides aggregated data to the CCDSS. This includes data from the health insurance registry physician claims and the hospital discharge abstract for all mental disorder diagnoses (International Classification of Diseases [ICD]-9 290–319 or ICD-10 F00–F99). Patients were defined as having had received a mental disorder diagnosis at least once during the year. Life expectancy was measured using Chiang's method for abridged life tables, complemented by the Hsieh method f...