Publications by authors named "Isabel Dyck"

This paper is based upon findings from the qualitative element of a mixed-methods study on the response of Black women aged 25-50 to a public health intervention related to breast cancer. The focus groups were conducted in the London Borough of Hackney, UK between 2013 and 2016, and were part of an evaluation of the effectiveness of a breast awareness DVD. While the content of the DVD was generally well-received by the participants, the focus group discussions revealed a complex and, at times, contradictory response to the women's construction as an 'at risk' community.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The mean age of presentation for breast cancer among black women is substantially earlier than their white counterparts. Black women also present with adverse prognostic factors that have major clinical implications, including lower survival. To pilot the use of a 6 min DVD on breast cancer in young (under 50 years) black women, to raise awareness and examine the impact of the DVD on increased consultation and referral rates among these women.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Body work is a key element of home healthcare. Recent restructuring of health and social care services means the home is increasingly a key site of long-term care. While there is a growing literature on the social dynamics between care recipients and their family caregivers, less is known about the formal work dynamic between paid care workers and care recipients and family caregivers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Although problems with power sharing are frequently described in discussions about client-centred practice, little research has explored occupational therapists' experiences with this model of service delivery. To critically examine this aspect of occupational therapy, an insider study was conducted.

Purpose: The objectives of the study were to explore therapists' experiences with client-centred practice and to reveal how power works within this practice and in the health service environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper contributes to recent literature that considers the role of everyday activity in constructing 'healthy space', specifically exploring the tension between agency and structural processes in explanation. The focus is a comparison of two groups of migrant women in British Columbia, Canada: South Asian Sikhs from Punjab, India, and Afghan-Muslim refugees. It explores the routine practices whereby they work to create 'healthy space' as they orchestrate their families' health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The physical, symbolic and experiential aspects of receiving long-term care are examined in this paper using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field. We draw on data from an ethnographic study of home care in 16 homes in urban, rural and remote locations in Ontario, Canada. Across all cases, data about domestic and caregiving routines were gathered through observation, interviews with clients and/or the primary family caregiver, interviews with service providers and videotaped tours of the home.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper is concerned with the constitution of the home as a landscape of care in a climate of extensive cost-cutting measures to community provided health care. It draws on data from a multi-disciplinary investigation of various dimensions of the home as a site of long-term care; this paper is concerned specifically with long-term health and associated home-care services provided by paid workers. Through analysis of interviews with adult care recipients and field observations, it examines the micro-scale processes through which the home is reconstructed as caregiving space, highlighting the negotiation of meanings of bodies and homes as fields of knowledge.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Purpose: Despite evidence that physical activity, a tool of rehabilitation, affects health and improves functional ability in people following spinal cord injury (SCI), such people are often physically inactive. We used a qualitative method to explore the experiences of individuals with SCI during participation in physical activity.

Subjects: The participants were 8 adults (5 male, 3 female), ranging from active to inactive, who were 2 to 27 years post-rehabilitation following SCI (paraplegic).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recent conceptual models, such as the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance, emphasize the transactional relationships between individuals, their occupations, and the environments in which they live. Nevertheless, further theoretical development is necessary in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the nature of interconnections between the environment, occupation, and disability. This paper draws on concepts from sociology and geography that can broaden our understanding of the environment and the manner in which its different dimensions may influence individuals' experiences of disability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The concept of culture has been widely applied as an explanatory concept within health care, often within a framework representing culture as a fixed, reified entity, with cultural groups existing in a binary sense vis-;-vis mainstream culture. However, if our scholarship is to generate knowledge that addresses longstanding patterns of inclusion and exclusion along lines such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, interpretive frames are needed that account for culture as embedded in fields of power relations; as mediated by social forces such as economics, politics, and historical patterns of oppression and colonization; and as being constantly renegotiated. In this article we trace a series of theoretical explorations, centered on the concept of cultural safety, with corresponding methodological implications, engaged in during preparation for an intensive period of fieldwork to study the hospitalization and help-seeking experiences of diverse ethnocultural populations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF