Thanks, Don.
I'm just going to go ahead and run through three slides here, with a couple of figures of the results that we found.
We start with some basic demographic information. This information comes from the IRS, which is the Indian registry system. It's basically a census of all registered and status first nations people in Ontario. This shows that as you increase in age, there are fewer people, which is to be expected, but the interesting part of this graph is the proportion of those living on and off reserve. That proportion is increasing as you increase in age. Looking at the 45 to 54 age group, it's around 32%, and that increases all the way up to about 40% in the highest age group.
The next figure here is what Don alluded to earlier. It talks about frailty in first nations people. The information for this comes from a different source. It comes from the regional health survey, which is a representative sample of on-reserve first nations individuals across the province. We looked at a list of 16 different frailty indicators that people were asked on the survey—things like self-perceived health, BMI, and vision loss. There's a list in the appendix of the report if you want to see it in its entirety.
Basically, anyone who had over five of those 16 conditions was considered to be frail. If someone had three to five, they were pretty frail. One or two was not that big an issue, as they were not considered to be frail. The easiest way to look at this figure is to look at that bottom section in each age group, the dark blue bar. That shows that as you increase in age groups, the proportion of people who are frail living in first nations communities is increasing dramatically. It increases all the way up to the age of about 65, where it reaches 50%.
That is a huge number. To compare it to the general Ontario population, we pulled in data from the CCHS, which is the Canadian community health survey, represented by those red squares on the last two bars there. We didn't have information for all the age ranges, just the older people. Looking again at the 65-year-old age group, only 16% of the general Ontario population in that age group is considered to be frail, compared to 50%, as I stated, on first nations reserves. Obviously that's a huge discrepancy.
As Don mentioned, people living on first nations reserves are becoming frail much earlier than the general population. If you look at the 16% and compare it to the comparable number in first nations, you have to go all the way back to the age of 35. It's a 25- or 30-year difference that we're seeing in the development of that frailty, so it's a big difference.
The last slide here is looking at the percentages of people who have two or more chronic conditions. This comes, again, from the IRS. We have a list of 18 different chronic conditions. Again, that list of 18 is in the appendix of the report, so you can look at that. It includes things like asthma, diabetes, and cancer—serious diseases. We looked among the first nations population, both on and off reserve, at how many people had at least two or more of those conditions across the age groups.
As you can see, that's increasing with age, as you would expect. One interesting thing, looking at the difference between off-reserve and on-reserve populations, is that it actually appears that the off-reserve have a higher rate of multiple chronic conditions. That increases with age, and you can see the biggest discrepancy in the 75-plus group.
We can't say for sure why that's the case. It could be that people who live off reserve have more frequent interactions with the health care system. The way this data is captured is by people going to the doctor, or going to the hospital or the ED. In order to show up in this data, they have to have access to those services. People who live off reserve are likely closer to those services and can access them more easily, and hence show up more in our data. It's also possible that people who have multiple chronic conditions are more likely to move off reserve to be closer to those services. Again, they would show up disproportionately more in the data because of that.
Aside from that, the main take-away from this is the huge number of people living with multiple chronic conditions. Once you get up to the highest age group, 70% to 80% of people have at least two of these serious conditions. These are people who really require a lot of care.
That's all for me, and I'll send it back to Don to finish the presentation.