Hamish Khamisa’s scientific contributions

You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of South Asian origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of South Asian origin, a health or multicultural settlement service provider responsible for the health or health care access for this population, or a health or settlement services decision-maker looking for evidence to support your decisions around programming or allocation of funding. Or maybe you are an academic looking for background literature or hoping to identify gaps in the research. This bibliography is the result of a systematic year-long search of a diverse literature that, for several reasons described below, is difficult to ‘mine’ without considerable investments of time that few can afford, hence the decision to share this valuable resource. We have further added value to the bibliography by indexing the references and their abstracts according to several criteria, including country of origin, health condition, type of care (primary, secondary, tertiary), intervention, etc. Explanations of terms within the index ensure that the meaning of each term is transparent.

We would like to make our bibliographies freely available in order to further research in the area of health and healthcare of, for and with, ethnocultural minority older adult populations in Canada and elsewhere. We would also like these references to be readily accessible to frontline service providers. However, we offer a couple of caveats. First, a scoping review does not assess the quality of materials included; it merely ascertains their relevance to the subject of interest and delimits an area of study. Second, the scoping review team has invested considerable time and resources to the ultimate production of these materials. This project was funded by a Knowledge Synthesis Grant (Study FRN 91772) Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Scoping review team members have also given very generously of their time. We therefore request that if you use any of our indexed bibliographies in your publications, reports or grant applications, please be so kind as to reference them appropriately, as indicated in this document.

You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of Chinese origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of Chinese origin, a health or multicultural settlement service provider responsible for the health or health care access for this population, or a health or settlement services decision-maker looking for evidence to support your decisions around programming or allocation of funding. Or maybe you are an academic looking for background literature or hoping to identify gaps in the research. This bibliography is the result of a systematic year-long search of a diverse literature that, for several reasons described below, is difficult to ‘mine’ without considerable investments of time that few can afford, hence the decision to share this valuable resource. We have further added value to the bibliography by indexing the references and their abstracts according to several criteria, including country of origin, health condition, type of care (primary, secondary, tertiary), intervention, etc. Explanations of terms within the index ensure that the meaning of each term is transparent.

This paper uses an intersectionality theoretical lens to interrogate selected findings of a scoping review of published and grey literature on the health and health care access of ethnocultural minority older adults. Our focus was on Canada and countries with similar immigrant populations and health care systems. Approximately 3300 source documents were reviewed covering the period 1980-2010: 816 met the eligibility criteria; 183 were Canadian. Summarized findings were presented to groups of older adults and care providers for critical review and discussion. Here we discuss the extent to which the literature accounts for the complexity of categories such as culture and ethnicity, recognizes the compounding effects of multiple intersections of inequity that include social determinants of health as well as the specificities of immigration, and places the experience of those inequities within the context of systemic oppression. We found that Canada’s two largest immigrant groups— Chinese and South Asians—had the highest representation in Canadian literature but, even for these groups, many topics remain unexplored and the heterogeneity within them is inadequately captured. Some qualitative literature, particularly in the health promotion and cultural competency domains, essentializes culture at the expense of other determinants and barriers, whereas the quantitative literature suffers from oversimplification of variables and their effects often due to the absence of proportionally representative data that captures the complexity of experience in minority groups.

Canadian abstracts included in scoping review