The Impact of Experience of Discrimination on Social and Health Care Service Use and Satisfaction among Racial and Ethnic Minority Family Caregivers of Older Adult Relatives in Canada

Relatively little is known about the relationships between satisfaction with services, utilizations of social and health care services and caregivers’ experiences of discrimination in Canada. Hence, this study is guided by the following research questions:

1) how do experiences of discrimination in daily life impact social and health care service use among racial and ethnic minority family caregivers of older adults? 

2) how do the experiences of discrimination in social and health care settings impact overall satisfaction with social and health care services among minority family caregivers of older adult relatives? 

3) how do caregivers and care recipients’ social locations, needs, and enabling factors impact family caregivers’ unmet needs?

Respite Care Accessibility in Montréal’s English-Speaking Disability Community: A Needs-Based Assessment

This research project will critically examine the accessibility of respite care through community integration social services for Anglophone persons with profound intellectual and/or developmental disability in Montréal. The research is guided by the hypothesis that a rationed care model, which prioritizes access to respite services for Francophone Montréal residents, creates systemic inequities that disadvantage Anglophone residents; these systemic inequities are exacerbated by the rationing of English-language services, and the subsequent prioritization of higher functioning and more youthful participants, deemed to possess “the potential to learn new skills.” As such, I will investigate the social and economic impacts of the new rationing policy on English-speaking adults for whom families are seeking respite care. Section fifteen (15) of the Act Respecting Health Services and Social Services (chapter S-4.2) states that “English-speaking persons are entitled to receive health services and social services in the English language” (1991). Nevertheless, the Anglophone families’ ability to locate and assess the acceptability of potential programs is made difficult by the fact that many important documents are available by Santé Montréal, Montréal’s health and social service network, in French only (personal communication, March 10, 2018). The exploratory research will attend to a range of variables, including access barriers for Anglophone residents and for care-seekers who are deemed to be of a lesser priority, and the felt impacts of the prioritization of disability respite services.

As such, the research will address the following inter-related questions:

(1) How does access to respite care services influence the felt impacts of the prioritization of disability respite services?

(2) In regard to linguistic barriers, what availability, accessibility, and acceptability needs are and are not being met by Anglophone disability services for the English-speaking disability community in Montréal?

Bilingual Language Development in Children with ASD

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can become bilingual however, when  children receive the diagnosis of ASD, professionals in the fields of healthcare and  education often recommend that minority language parents refrain from using their  minority language and instead speak only the majority language with their child. Such recommendations are based on the belief that deficits often reported in children with ASD, such as attending to others and difficulty with phonology, will make the acquisition of two languages difficult. However, such recommendations are not supported by current evidence. 

We aim to better understand how the bilingual experience impacts language acquisition in these children and examine whether there are differences in language learning between monolingual children with ASD and their bilingual peers. We predict that bilingual and monolingual children with ASD will have formal language abilities similar to those of their bilingual and monolingual neurotypical peers. We also predict that while neurotypical children will have better performances on the narrative tasks than their peers with ASD, bilingual children with ASD will outperform their monolingual peers with ASD given their improved socio-pragmatic skills.

Examining Barriers to Mental Health Access for Canadian-born Anglophones and Chinese-born English-favouring Allophones in the Montreal Area

We are interested in examining and comparing two linguistic minority groups: Canadian-born Anglophones (whose first language is English) and Chinese-born English-favouring Allophones (whose first language is Chinese, and whose preferred official language is English). Canadian born Anglophone (AN) communities face substantial linguistic challenges when using mental health services in French, and these challenges have largely been neglected in the literature, perhaps due to their majority status in other provinces. Chinese-born English-favouring allophones (AL) are at a double-disadvantage for healthcare in Quebec, being a linguistic minority (Chinese first language) within a linguistic minority (Anglophone community) in the larger Quebec context. We hope to profile the perceived mental health communication challenges in AN and AL communities when accessing mental health services in French.

We hypothesize that both Canadian-born Anglophones (AN) and Chinese-born English favouring Allophones (AL) will perceive language barriers when accessing mental health services in French, and the extent to which language barriers are perceived will negatively correlate with the individual’s proficiency in French. Additionally, we hypothesize that ALs will perceive significantly more cultural barriers when using mental health services in Quebec compared with ANs.

Francophone Mental Health Care Practitioners’ Perceptions of Working with Anglophone Minorities: Challenges and How They Affect Practice

We are interested in investigating the perceived challenges of working with the Anglophone linguistic minorities reported by Francophone mental health practitioners in Quebec. Oftentimes, Anglophone linguistic minorities in Quebec receives mental health care services from primarily Francophone practitioners. The experiences of linguistic minority patients have been extensively documented, and it has been shown that being part of a linguistic minority decreases accessibility to health care and leads to poorer outcomes for patients (Jacobs, Chen, Karliner, Agger-Gupta, & Mutha, 2006). However, the experiences and challenges of majority linguistic mental health care providers working with linguistic minorities have rarely been explored.

We are interested in conducting a qualitative study on the experience of Francophone mental health care providers, who are part of the linguistic majority in Quebec, and are often faced with providing health care services to Anglophone linguistic minorities.

Improving Access to Fertility Care and Empowerment of Linguistic Minority Patients with Infertility Through a Mobile App

The current project involves the evaluation of a mobile app developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers and health professionals to provide targeted bilingual informational and social support resources to patients undergoing fertility treatments in Montreal. The app content will be available in both French and English and using language that aims to be accessible to everyone with fertility concerns. The educational component will include evidence-based information on a variety of fertility-related topics and presented in a way that is easy to understand and accessible to people with differing eHealth literacy levels. Specific sections will be devoted to information about infertility diagnoses, treatment options, risks to fertility, reproductive health promotion as well as how to navigate through treatments and tips on how to cope with infertility. The social support component will consist of discussion boards and a peer support network to help connect patients with others who can understand the difficulty of their situation. The app is hypothesized to have a beneficial impact on patients’ well-being (stress, anxiety and depression), perceived empowerment, quality of life, and eHealth literacy.

The principal objective of my research project is to investigate the effectiveness of a patient-centered mobile health (mHealth) intervention that delivers informational and emotional support in improving patient empowerment in infertile patients facing language barriers in Montreal.