Children's Mental Health Hospitalizations in Ontario Before and During COVID-19

March 2017 to July 2021 data on mental health-related hospitalizations and emergency department visits among children and youth in Ontario, Canada. The population-based study was conducted by Tony Antoniou and analyzes geographic variation and neighborhood correlates of service use during the pandemic. The dataset is licensed under CC-BY-4.0 and was last updated in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Identify geographic hotspots for pediatric mental health service use based on hospitalization and ED visit rates.
• Analyze the association between neighborhood income and acute mental health service utilization rates.
• Model the relationship between family size, remoteness, and mental health-related hospitalization rates.
• Compare pre-pandemic (March 2017-February 2020) and pandemic-era (March 2020-July 2021) service use patterns.

Strengths

• Covers a 4.5-year time range from March 2017 to July 2021, enabling pre-pandemic and pandemic-era comparisons.
• Includes specific statistical associations, such as a 0.50 SD decrease in hospitalization rates per SD increase in neighborhood income.
• Focuses on a defined population (Ontario children and youth) for a population-based study.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset is small (916.2 KB), suggesting limited scope or aggregated summary data.

Provenance

Source

Tony Antoniou via figshare.

Collection Method

Population-based study using hot spot analyses and spatial regression models on administrative health data.

Time Range

March 2017 to July 2021.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-18 05:41:07; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Ontario, Canada, with focus on rural and northern regions.