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.