five - Literature on health and social care

Summary

This chapter focuses specifically on those issues in the literature related to health and social care (n=55) which draw the intersection of ethnicity and old age. This means that this specific theme was addressed in just under half of the articles addressed in the previous chapter. Before we begin to describe what the scoping review conducted ended up revealing, it seems necessary to provide a bit of insight into the themes that are often associated with this topic by consulting, as I did in the previous chapter, the handbooks, encyclopaedias and edited collections that are available.

What is immediately noteworthy about the health and social care literature and the nexus of interests focused on here is that both tend to depart from the fact that, as stated in the previous chapter, older people with minority ethnic and/or racial backgrounds tend to have poorer health than their majority ethnic counterparts, which is believed to have implications for an array of issues regarding health and social care. In the first handbook specifically addressing issues related to older people with minority backgrounds – the Handbook of Minority Aging - there is one entry on health and social care, which begins by stating that ‘the complex mix of services and funding makes it difficult to provide a comprehensive picture of LTSS [long-term services and supports] use by minority elders, but it appears that the net result is that formal LTSS use overall continues to be lower for minority elders’ (Padilla-Frausto et al., 2014: 221).

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps understandable that when one consults handbooks and encyclopaedias of relevance to this book's topic, one notes that it is often taken for granted that most of the health and social services that are available are not optimal for minority ethnic populations. Scholars in this field tend to argue that this is the case because these services have been designed with majority populations in mind and lack the kind of culture sensitivity that is needed if minorities’ needs and preferences are to be taken into serious consideration when planning and providing formal care services.