Quick Facts
5.3%
Immigrant seniors in the GTA receiving care exclusively through family and friends, relative to only 3.5% of non-immigrant GTA seniors (2016).
2x
Those whose mother tongue is not English are nearly twice as likely to only receive informal care (6.4% compared to 3.4% for seniors with English as mother tongue) (2016)
6.3%
Immigrant seniors reporting having un-met needs in home care, relative to only 4.1% of non-immigrants (2016).
If you had a broken pipe in your home, would you request that your plumber be somebody who shared an ethnicity and culture with you? Most people, in Canada at least, would consider such a request ridiculous and even discriminatory. But what about a person coming into your home to provide care for a family member who doesn’t speak English and feels more comfortable with culturally specific care?
Unlike being a plumber, care work involves emotional labour and intimacy. Ana de Sousa is a primary caregiver at a nursing home. She feels the culturally and linguistically specific care she offers provides cultural comfort that can drastically impact the health and wellbeing of those she cares for.
She recalls a time when the staff were nervous because a resident was losing weight. Ana was assigned to assist. The pair would speak Portuguese together at meal times. The resident’s appetite began to recover, and her weight soon stabilized.
The intimacy created through Ana’s culturally focused care work is rewarding, but it can also be draining. The emotional intensity of care work puts a lot of pressure on care workers. Ana recalls the experience of caring for her grandmother: “There were moments that I had to walk away for a bit just to give her some timeout, and to give myself timeout.”
Ana’s experiences are a reminder that language and culture can mean the difference between somebody feeling comfortable enough to eat, or go hungry. As obvious as it may sound, care work involves people caring for people. Because of this, the worker’s well-being is always central to the larger narrative.