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01-06-2019 | Original Paper

‘The Elephant on the Table’: Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services

Authors: Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham, Sonya Sharma, Sonya Grypma, Barbara Pesut, Richard Sawatzky, Dorolen Wolfs

Published in: Journal of Religion and Health | Issue 3/2019

Abstract

Healthcare services are increasingly being provided in the home. At the same time, these home contexts are changing as global migration has brought unprecedented diversity both in the recipients of care, and home health workers. In this paper, we present findings of a Canadian study that examined the negotiation of religious and ethnic plurality in home health. Qualitative analysis of the data from interviews and observations with 46 participants—clients, administrators, home healthcare workers—revealed how religion is expressed and ‘managed’ in home health services.

We use ‘home health’ in keeping with local terminology. Elsewhere, equivalent terms might be ‘homecare’, ‘domiciliary care’, or ‘district nursing’.

For the sake of this paper, we use religion as shorthand for the continuum of religion and spirituality and likewise use ethnicity for the domain of race, ethnicity and culture. This pragmatic choice comes with its problems, partly because of the tendency in healthcare and nursing literatures to frame religion as a negative term in contrast to spirituality as a more inclusive term (Clarke 2009; Fowler et al. 2011; Hill et al. 2000; Sharma et al. 2011). However, given that the theoretical grounding for this project comes from the sociology of religion, we have followed that disciplinary semantic.

In other publications, we have presented findings from this study in regard to religious practices in healthcare—specifically the practice of prayer (Sharma et al. 2012); spirituality and nursing leadership (Reimer-Kirkham et al. 2012a); a historical analysis of spirituality in home health (Grypma et al. 2012); and religious accommodation in healthcare organizations (Reimer-Kirkham and Cochrane 2016).

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Title: ‘The Elephant on the Table’: Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services
Authors: Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham
Sonya Sharma
Sonya Grypma
Barbara Pesut
Richard Sawatzky
Dorolen Wolfs
Publication date: 01-06-2019
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Religion and Health / Issue 3/2019
Print ISSN: 0022-4197
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6571
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-017-0489-7

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‘The Elephant on the Table’: Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services

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