Canada has two official languages (English and French) that vary in usage by province/territory and other smaller geographic units. The objective of this study was to compare the characteristics of persons receiving care in long-term care homes serving different language groups and to examine the extent to which data quality and distributional properties of indicators vary between homes.

We used routinely collected interRAI Minimum Data Set (MDS) 2.0 assessment data from nine Canadian provinces and territories to classify 1,333 long-term care homes into predominately English, French, and mixed language groups. We compared resident characteristics, risk-adjusted quality indicator performance, and assessment data quality by facility language group.

In these data, eighteen (1.35%) long-term care homes served predominately French-speaking residents. An additional 274 (20.54%) homes were classified as mixed language homes, where 20% or more residents spoke a language other than English or French. The remaining homes (1,042; 78.11%) were classified as English homes. We did not observe substantial differences between facility language groups in terms of resident characteristics, quality indicator performance, and data quality.

Despite linguistic differences, long-term care homes in Canada serving residents that speak predominately French and other languages can be compared directly with homes serving predominantly English-speaking residents. These findings support language-agnostic benchmarking of quality of care among long-term care homes situated across Canada, particularly in officially bilingual provinces.