Perceived Challenges and Unmet Primary Care Access Needs among Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in Canada

Abstract

Introduction: Understanding barriers in primary health care access faced by Canadian immigrants, especially among women, is important for developing mitigation strategies. The aim of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of perceived challenges and unmet primary health care access needs of Bangladeshi immigrant women in Canada. Methods: In this qualitative study, we conducted 7 focus groups among a sample of 42 first-generation immigrant women on their experiences in primary health care access in their preferred language, Bangla. Descriptive analysis was used for their socio-demographic characteristics and inductive thematic analysis was applied to the qualitative data. Results: The hurdles reported included long wait time at emergency service points, frustration from slow treatment process, economic losses resulting from absence at work, communication gap between physicians and immigrant patients, and transportation problem to go to the health care centers. No access to medical records for walk-in doctors, lack of urgent care, and lack of knowledge about Canadian health care systems are a few of other barriers emerged from the focus group discussions. Conclusions: The community perception about lack of primary health care resources is quite prevalent and is considered as one of the most important barriers by the grassroots community members.

Meaningful and deep community engagement efforts for pragmatic research and beyond: engaging with an immigrant/racialised community on equitable access to care

“…We prepared to conduct a number of focus groups, which were to be followed by a community survey to identify barriers and propose solutions to overcome those barriers as voiced by Bangladeshi-Canadian community members. We have already shared our findings on the barriers to primary healthcare access raised by Bangladeshi-Canadian women 14 and men, 15 as well as their perceptions on possible solutions to overcoming those barriers. 16 We also reported on community prioritisation of the issues they suggested we work on.…”

“…They were also engaged during the analysis process to contextualise the codes and themes arising from the focus group discussions, as well as writing the manuscript. [14][15][16] We also made sure to conduct member checking by reaching out to the community members who agreed during the focus group discussions to be contacted for this purpose. Our community prioritisation survey data were also analysed and contextualised through actively involving the community-based team members.…”

Understanding the Influence of Ghanaian Women’s Migration Patterns on Access to Health Care

“…External migrants experienced changes in familial dynamics post-migration resulting in altered gender roles and responsibilities of family members, distanced relationships, and emotional implications on children left behind. The healthy immigrant effect [HIE] refers to the phenomenon that immigrants arrive healthier than their Canadian-born counterparts and as the length of stay increases their health inversely declines [18]; the immigrants develop the same or potentially worse health status than that of the Canadian-born population [19]. The importance of expanding health efforts to all aspects of migrant health, including spiritual and mental health, is important, as it improves the overall quality of life and allows for the provision of holistic care.…”

Involving im/migrant community members for knowledge co-creation: the greater the desired involvement, the greater the need for capacity building

“…Our community member involvement strategies and efforts were embedded within a participatory approach, thus it entailed ongoing relationships between the researchers and community representatives. Using a South-Asian community (Bangladeshi-Canadians: people immigrating from Bangladesh to Canada and currently residing in Calgary, Alberta) as a case, the learnings from the studies [16][17][18][19] conducted under our programme of research informed our understanding of how to involve immigrant community members in community-based research through various stages of engagement towards active collaboration. These activities not only allowed us to collaborate with community members but to value their knowledge and expertise and view them as partners and coresearchers.…”

“…We involved our research team's community scholar and citizen researcher members to interpret the findings regarding equitable access to healthcare faced by Bangladeshi-Canadians. [16][17][18] They have been an integral part of our manuscript writing as co-authors. Having the engagement from large and diverse community-level participants also allowed for the dissemination of results to a larger audience.…”