Inequities in access to directly-funded home care in Canada: a privilege only afforded to some.

BACKGROUND: Directly-funded home care (DF) provides government funds to people who need assistance with the activities of daily living, allowing them to arrange their own services. As programs expand globally, many allow DF clients to hire home care agencies to organize their services rather than finding their own workers. In Canada, half of the DF home care programs allow users to purchase agency services. The goal of this research is to describe the role of agency providers in DF home care in Canada and consider potential equity implications for service access from the perspectives of clients and families. METHODS: Framed with intersectionality, the study included online focus groups with families and clients (n = 56) in the two Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba between June 2021-April 2022. All transcripts underwent qualitative thematic analysis using open and axial coding techniques. Each transcript was analyzed by two of three possible independent coders using Dedoose qualitative analysis software. RESULTS: The article presents five thematic findings. First, the focus groups document high rates of satisfaction with the care regardless of whether the client uses agency providers. Second, agency providers mediate some of the administrative barriers and emotional strain of using DF home care, and this is especially important for family caregivers who are working or have additional care responsibilities. Third, there are out-of-pocket expenses reported by most participants, with agency clients describing administrative fees despite lower pay for the frontline care workers. Fourth, agencies are not generally effective for linguistic and/or cultural matching between workers and families. Finally, we find that DF care programs cannot compensate for a limited informal support network. CONCLUSIONS: Clients and families often intentionally choose DF home care after negative experiences with other public service options, yet the results suggest that in some Canadian contexts, DF home care is a privilege only afforded to some. Given the growing inequalities that exist in Canadian society, all public home care options must be open to all who need it, irrespective of ability to pay, degree of social support, or competence in the English language.

Intersectionality, health equity, and EDI: What's the difference for health researchers?

Many countries adopted comprehensive national initiatives to promote equity in higher education with the goal of transforming the culture of research. Major health research funders are supporting this work through calls for projects that focus on equity, resulting in a proliferation of theoretical frameworks including "intersectionality," "health equity," and variations of equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI. This commentary is geared at individual principal investigators and health research teams who are developing research proposals and want to consider equity issues in their research, perhaps for the first time. We present histories and definitions of three commonly used frameworks: intersectionality, health equity, and EDI. In the context of health research, intersectionality is a methodology (a combination of epistemology and techniques) that can identify the relationships among individual identities and systems of oppression; however, it should also be used internally by research teams to reflect on the production of knowledge. Health equity is a societal goal that operationalizes the social determinants of health to document and address health disparities at the population level. EDI initiatives measure and track progress within organizations or teams and are best suited to inform the infrastructure and human resourcing "behind the scenes" of a project. We encourage researchers to consider these definitions and strive to tangibly move health research towards equity both in the topics we study and in the ways we do research.