With the accelerated ageing of the population, despite sustained immigration, worrying trends are emerging with regard to the health of populations. The health care system is facing major challenges, both in terms of accessibility and care, and in terms of productivity and the dissemination of innovations.

The ageing of the population represents a major challenge for the economy, public finances and pension plans in Quebec. The growth in public health spending has been significant over the past few decades, and there is no sign that this growth will be lower in the years to come. In particular, there has been a significant increase in chronic diseases and an increased demand for several types of care related to loss of autonomy, while the capacity of the health system remains limited.

The Health theme aims to better understand and predict the repercussions of current and future changes, to evaluate the impact of existing policies and to analyse other possible solutions to these issues. To do so, research activities rely on the use of state-of-the-art modelling tools and the application of evaluation methods applied to massive data at the population level and to administrative and program data on income, immigration, retirement and health.

The CIRANO Pole on the Efficiency of Health Services and Policies is part of this broad theme, as is some of the work of the Research Chair in Intergenerational Economics on measuring the drivers of public health care spending in Quebec, particularly inequalities in health care spending using administrative data.