Navigating "Being Seen": Experiences of Older Adult Arab Immigrants and Family Caregivers Accessing Health Care Services in Ontario.

Immigrants to Canada face unique barriers to accessing health care including communication barriers, socioeconomic limitations, and a lack of health care system navigation knowledge. Arabs in particular face mainstream negative attitudes, propagated through political discourses as well as entertainment media. We sought to understand how older adult Arab immigrants and family caregivers accessed and experienced health care in Ontario. We conducted a critical constructivist grounded theory, using Charmaz's approach to grounded theory. A critical constructivist grounded theory method asks not only "what" social processes are happening and "how" but also "why" and "who" benefits. Both older adult immigrant Arabs and family caregivers negotiated their visibility and being seen in the context of accessing health care. The subcategories co-constructed grounded in the data resulted in the grounded theory of being seen. The four subcategories included (1) Being seen as family, (2) Being seen by the Arab community, (3) Being seen in their countries of origin, and (4) Being seen as foreign. We found participants to be describing how and when they are being seen in health care settings, by health care providers, in relation to their diasporic communities, and in the context of their visibility as minorities in Canada. These findings point to the ways in which health care providers can begin to consider Arab older adult immigrants as service users to reduce barriers to service access and delivery.