Category: Masters Public Health
Status: Awaiting final IRB approval
Background: Caregivers of children with cerebral palsy (CP) may encounter challenges with physical access to service providers or perceive attitudes that affect their experience with health care for the children. In order to ensure equal access to health care for children with disabilities it is necessary to have information on the experiences of caregivers of these children, yet the published literature appears void of this information. This study aims to help fill a gap in the knowledge and literature concerning whether caregivers of children with cerebral palsy in Barbados experience unequal or facilitated access to healthcare facilities, under what circumstances these experiences occur and the effects of these experiences. It is expected that this study will yield rich insight into their experiences and the meaning they make of such experiences. This may then inform the services providers and policy makers of what is being done well and what could be improved in the provision of services to this community.
Objectives: The aim of this study is to explore and describe the experiences of these caregivers when they take their children with cerebral palsy for care in public and private doctors’ offices, surgeries and clinics. The specific objectives of this study are: 1) To explore the caregivers’ views on the attitudes of healthcare providers towards themselves and their children 2) To identify the factors in the experience of caregivers of children with CP that caregivers perceive as facilitators to access to healthcare facilities and services and 3) To determine the factors in the experience of caregivers of children with CP that caregivers perceive as barriers to access to healthcare facilities and services.
Project Outline: For this qualitative study, in-depth interviews with caregivers of children with cerebral palsy, aged 5-17 will be used to collect data on the lives experiences of the participants. Interviews will be audiotaped in addition to the notes taken during the interviews. Interviews will be transcribed and following transcription and comparison into qualitative analysis software such as ATLAS.ti. As interviews are transcribed, codes will be developed inductively and iteratively. These codes will be organised into a codebook and used to identify common issues, basic themes and organizing themes that emerge from the data, which will then be discussed with reference to published literature.