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Health Statistics

A source for research and instructions for finding and using health statistics.

Google Searching

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Google and health stats

Google (or another search engine of your choice) is often a good tool for finding health statistics.

For example, if you are looking for statistics on the use of illegal IV drug use in Canada, you could search in Google for the following:

Canada statistics "injection drug use"


Remember a few things about Google searching:

  • Start your searches in Google's Advanced Search engine
  • Putting quotes around a phrase will make your results more exact
  • Search for synonyms of terms or phrases - in this example search for "injection drug use", "iv drug use", "intravenous drug use", "illicit drug use", etc.
  • Searching for a specific document type such as ".doc" or ".pdf" will often retrieve government reports.  Use the "advanced search" option in Google to do this.
  • You can also limit to specific sites such as those from the Government of Canada by typing "gc.ca" in the "Search within a site or domain" box

Go to Google's Advanced Search page

Finding Statistical Reports using Novanet

 

Many statistical reports are listed in Novanet.  Use the following Subject Headings to find them:

Health surveys - Canada (or Nova Scotia) Vital statistics - Canada (or Nova Scotia)
Morbidity - Canada (or Nova Scotia) Mortality - Canada (or Nova Scotia)
Public health - Canada  Health status indicators - Canada

 

Or you can search by a specific topic or disease in Novanet such as:


Tuberculosis - epidemiology - Canada Tuberculosis - mortality - Canada
Cardiovascular diseases - epidemiology - Canada Cardiovascular diseases - mortality - Canada
Neoplasms - epidemiology - Canada Neoplasms - mortality - Canada
Indians, North American - statistics & numerical data - Canada Disabled Persons - statistics & numerical data - Canada
Heart Diseases - epidemiology - Canada Heart Diseases - mortality - Canada
Accidents, Traffic - statistics & numerical data - Canada Indigenous peoples - Canada - statistics (LCSH)

 

Browsing areas on the shelf (book call numbers):

HA 37...........................General Statistics by country
HB................................Vital Statistics
W 74............................Medical Economics and Health Care Costs
WA 16..........................Public Health Statistics
WA 900........................Medical Statistics
WA 110........................Communicable Diseases
WA 530........................International Health
WB 15..........................Classification of Diseases

In general, recent statistics on a specific topic are listed in the * 16 classification section of each subject area.

Databases

CINAHL