Fostering Dialogue Across Care Worker and 2SLGBTQI Older Adult Divides: An Arts-Based Action Research Project

Two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (2SLGBTQI) older adults face increased barriers to accessing healthcare services. These barriers include Canadian healthcare systems and structures that continue to be geared towards a cis-heteronormative patient population (Daley, 2006; Mule et al., 2009) as well as discrimination and negative care encounters that older 2SLGBTQI people have faced earlier in life (e.g, Brotman et al., 2007). Fears of homophobia and transphobia in home care and long-term care and having to "go back into the closet" are especially widespread. These are fears documented by researchers for over a decade (e.g., Brotman et al. 2007; Sussman et al., 2018); fears which, significantly, can target care workers who are mostly people of colour and immigrants (Pang, forthcoming). As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown care workers perform "essential" work, yet are undervalued, and can experience violence in the workplace (Daly et al., 2011). While they seek to provide person-centered care and to access opportunities to better understand 2SLGBTQI clients' needs, these opportunities are lacking (Daley and MacDonnell, 2015). This research study seeks to better understand the key disconnects between 2SLGBTQI older adults and care workers in the personal support work sector, and to identify how these can be bridged through arts-based action research. Arts-based methods are an increasingly popular research approach (Luttrell & Chalfen, 2010; Mitchell, De Lange, & Moletsane, 2017) where art plays a primary role in knowledge co-creation and is a source of data representation (Kunt, 2020). An arts-based method will allow researchers to explore sensitive and possibly controversial topics and issues sometimes difficult to articulate using words alone (Dew, Smith, Collings, & Savage, 2018), ideal for this research that centrally seeks to create space for dialogue, bridge gaps, and improve access to care.