Koehn Sharon
Centre for Healthy Aging at Providence, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Ageing Soc. 2009 May 1;29(4):585-608. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X08007952.
The 'Barriers to Access to Care for Ethnic Minority Seniors ' (BACEMS) study in Vancouver, British Columbia, found that immigrant families torn between changing values and the economic realities that accompany immigration cannot always provide optimal care for their elders. Ethnic minority seniors further identified language barriers, immigration status, and limited awareness of the roles of the health authority and of specific service providers as barriers to health care. The configuration and delivery of health services, and health-care providers' limited knowledge of the seniors' needs and confounded these problems. To explore the barriers to access, the BACEMS study relied primarily on focus group data collected from ethnic minority seniors and their families and from health and multicultural service providers. The applicability of the recently developed model of 'candidacy', which emphasises the dynamic, multi-dimensional and contingent character of health-care access to ethnic minority seniors, was assessed. The candidacy framework increased sensitivity to ethnic minority seniors' issues and enabled organisation of the data into manageable conceptual units, which facilitated translation into recommendations for action, and revealed gaps that pose questions for future research. It has the potential to make Canadian research on the topic more co-ordinated.
不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华市开展的“少数族裔老年人就医障碍”（BACEMS）研究发现，移民家庭在价值观转变与移民带来的经济现实之间左右为难，无法始终为长辈提供最佳照料。少数族裔老年人还指出，语言障碍、移民身份以及对卫生当局和特定服务提供者角色的认知有限是获得医疗保健的障碍。卫生服务的配置与提供，以及医疗保健提供者对老年人需求的了解有限，使这些问题更加复杂。为探究就医障碍，BACEMS研究主要依靠从少数族裔老年人及其家庭以及卫生和多元文化服务提供者那里收集的焦点小组数据。评估了最近开发的“候选资格”模型的适用性，该模型强调了少数族裔老年人获得医疗保健的动态、多维度和偶然性质。候选资格框架提高了对少数族裔老年人问题的敏感度，使数据能够组织成易于管理的概念单元，这有助于转化为行动建议，并揭示了有待未来研究解答的差距。它有可能使加拿大在该主题上的研究更加协调。
