Swarna Weerasinghe

Intersection of Canadian Policy Parameters Affecting Women with Precarious Immigration Status: A Baseline for Understanding Barriers to Health

Canadian federal policy provides a framework for the immigration and health experiences of immigrant women. The official immigration category under which a migrant is admitted determines to what degree her right to remain in the country (immigration status) is precarious. Women immigrants fall primarily into the more dependent categories and they experience barriers to access to health services arising from this precarious status. Federal immigration and health policies create direct barriers to health through regulation of immigrants’ access to services as well as unintended secondary barriers. These direct and secondary policy barriers intersect with each other and with socio-cultural barriers arising from the migrant’s socio-economic and ethno-cultural background to undermine equitable access to health for immigrant women living in Canada.

Connection between the meaning of health and interaction with health professionals: caring for immigrant women

The meaning of health perceived by adult immigrant women in Canada is discussed from the perspectives of immigration, culture, and lived experience to understand their encounters with health care professionals. Authors base their findings on the thematic analysis of focus group data. Immigrant women viewed health as the outcome of a web of interactions between conditions of mental, physical, social, emotional, environmental, and spiritual well-being, appealing to both biomedical and phenomenological ideologies. Our analyses of qualitative data revealed that the disagreements noted by immigrant women when interacting with health care professionals were due to the discrepancies between their cultural views of health and the dominant biomedical perspective.

Longitudinal associations of cannabis and illicit drug use with depression, suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts among Nova Scotia high school students

OBJECTIVE To examine associations of cannabis and other illicit drug use with depression, suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts over a two year period during adolescence. METHODS Nine hundred and seventy-six school students in four high schools in northern Nova Scotia, Canada, were surveyed in grade 10 and followed up in grade 12. Assessments of past 30 day cannabis and illicit drug use as well as mental health variables (risk of depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts) were obtained at baseline (2000 and 2001) and follow-up two years later (2002 and 2003). Generalized estimating equations modelled depression, suicidal ideation and attempts among illicit drug users and non-users. RESULTS Illicit drug use with or without cannabis use was significantly associated with higher odds of depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempt. Heavy cannabis use alone predicted depression but not suicidal ideation or attempt. CONCLUSIONS Illicit drug use, with and without accompanying cannabis use, among high school students increases the risk of depression, suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts. Heavy cannabis use alone predicts depression but not suicidal ideation or attempts.

Homicide in Chicago from 1890 to 1930: prohibition and its impact on alcohol‐ and non‐alcohol‐related homicides

AIM The aim of the current paper is to examine the impact of the enactment of constitutional prohibition in the United States in 1920 on total homicides, alcohol-related homicides and non-alcohol-related homicides in Chicago. DESIGN Data are drawn from the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, a data set chronicling 11 018 homicides in Chicago between 1870 and 1930. Interrupted time-series and autoregression integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are employed to examine the impact of prohibition on three separate population-adjusted homicide series. All models control for potential confounding from World War I demobilization and from trend data drawn from Wesley Skogans Time-Series Data from Chicago. FINDINGS Total and non-alcohol-related homicide rates increased during prohibition by 21% and 11%, respectively, while alcohol-related homicides remained unchanged. For other covariates, alcohol-related homicides were related negatively to the size of the Chicago police force and positively to police expenditures and to the proportion of the Chicago population aged 21 years and younger. Non-alcohol-related homicides were related positively to police expenditures and negatively to the size of the Chicago police force. CONCLUSIONS While total and non-alcohol-related homicides in the United States continued to rise during prohibition, a finding consistent with other studies, the rate of alcohol-related homicides remained unchanged. The divergent impact of prohibition on alcohol- and non-alcohol-related homicides is discussed in relation to previous studies of homicide in this era.

Inequities in visible minority Immigrant Women's Healthcare accessibility

Purpose – In this article visible minority immigrant womens encounters and perceptions in accessing healthcare in Canada are explored. The aim is to understand the role play of the vulnerability statuses, gender, visibility, immigration and their intersectionality as factors contributing to (in)equitiesin healthcare accessibility.Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative data were collected from a sample of 32 adult immigrant women, living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, using five focus group meetings. The participants have migrated from five regions of the world; South‐Eastern Asia, Middle‐Eastern Asia, the African continent, Latin/South America and non‐English speaking countries in Eastern Europe. Data were analysed using an inductive coding using the cultural health capital framework.Findings – The findings reveal that audio and visual personal attributes such as skin colour, accent and excess body weight that are beyond Canadian norms lead to unfavourable interpersonal dynamics. Fundamental causes ...

A conceptual model for a culturally responsive community‐based diabetes prevention programme

Type 2 diabetes mellitus has emerged as a major public health problem in Canada. Although the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among black people is higher than that of white people in Canada, there is no diabetes prevention programme specifically designed to address the behavioural and sociocultural influences on the development of the disease in the black communities. This paper discusses a proposed conceptual framework for the development and evaluation of a diabetes prevention programme that is culturally relevant and responsive to the black communities in Canada. The research literature and results of a recent pilot study that assessed the programming needs of four black communities provide the basis upon which the proposed framework is developed.

Why Networks Matter and How They Work? The Role of Social Networks in Attracting and Retaining Immigrants in Small Cities

Drawing from over 50 semi-structured interviews performed in three small cities (Charlottetown, Moncton, and St. John’s) and one larger comparator city (Halifax) of the Atlantic Provinces, this chapter addresses social networks from multidisciplinary angles. We see that immigrants hold complex understandings of the meanings of multiculturalism. However, variations emerge relative to perceptions of ‘community’, its value and purpose. While some participants report having strong and positive relationships with kin and other immigrants from their ethno cultural associations, others spoke positively about broader ‘Canadian’ social networks. For younger participants, the idea of maintaining ‘traditions’, for example, through marriage to someone with a common ethno cultural heritage, is a matter of some ambivalence. But variations occur relative to the size of the city and its immigrant populations, as confirmed also by comparisons with a similar sample of respondents from Halifax. However, broadly speaking, universal principles such as honesty and respect are seen as the basis for positive social relations, more so than shared culturally based values. Not surprisingly, the data from this project also reveal notable variation in the types of networks used and, often, how they are deployed based on gender with women’s culturally assigned roles in terms of social reproduction having an impact and, for example, tending to produce ‘broader’ rather than ‘denser’ networks.