Her significant contribution to the field has earned her the Award for Research Excellence in Francophonie from the University of Ottawa’s Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
Francophone minority communities, a factor for health care to consider
The core principles of Louise Bouchard’s work are equality, Canada’s official languages and community health and wellness.
How big are the Francophone minority communities in Ontario? What social and local conditions are members living in? What’s their health status? Do they have fair access to health-care services?
All this raises another fundamental, three-pronged question: Where’s the data that can give us those answers, who can access it and how can it be used to spur action?
A professor emerita at uOttawa and an expert in the sociology of health, Bouchard has spent much of her career tackling those questions. Her research has focused on four major areas: identifying Francophone communities’ needs, documenting how available and accessible services in French are, measuring linguistic inequalities in health care and leveraging evidence to inform public policy and service planning.
A blind spot for health-care research
It was when Bouchard came to uOttawa in 2000 that she fully grasped how serious of a gap there was in the academic literature.
Health encompasses more than just medicine and biology. It’s also shaped by the social, economic, political and institutional conditions people live in. That’s why Bouchard resolved to help ensure linguistic minority status is factored into research on the social and structural determinants of health.
Her goal is clear: to provide a more complete picture of how belonging to a Francophone minority community can contribute to health inequalities and unequal access to services.
“In Canada, the issue is bigger than what language people speak,” she says. “What matters is living your life in French, as a member of an official language minority community. That means people’s linguistic reality is a marker for unique social, local and institutional conditions that could affect their health and access to services.”
The data dilemma
The question is how to measure those realities.
Where can data be found on Francophones’ health, and what does it really capture? Bouchard has sought to answer that question by developing a research program based mainly on secondary analysis of Statistics Canada health surveys and administrative health databases that include language variables.
But studying a relatively small minority population poses significant methodological challenges. Some databases don’t include language as a variable, there’s a lack of standardization from one source to another and sample sizes are sometimes too small to produce accurate estimates, especially at the regional level.
On top of that, not all the available data can necessarily be used to drive action.
According to Bouchard, “Our health information systems don’t always have enough capacity to document the health status of Francophone minority communities, the services available to them and the performance of the health-care system in treating them. All performance evaluation relies on a series of indicators. But these indicators are still too limited for Francophones, even at the provincial level and more so at the regional level, where a lot of service planning is done.”
Driving action with data, from collection to creation to use
Bouchard is keen to make data truly useful for service planning and public policy development, so she’s also worked to develop innovative tools for putting knowledge into practice.
One of these tools is a prototype for a health geoportal. It lets users visualize data on populations, their health status, available services and health-care professionals’ language skills, all at once. She also helped create an atlas of Francophone older adults across Ontario, interactive dashboards on long-term care and several digital platforms for data dissemination and mining.
Bouchard has co-led a number of major research networks, including the Réseau interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la santé des francophones and the Réseau de recherche appliquée sur la santé des francophones de l’Ontario. Currently, she’s co-director of FORCES-Santé, an observatory for collaborative research and studies on the health of Francophone minority communities as well as services for them.
These contributions have made evidence more accessible to researchers, policymakers and communities alike, and they’ve helped establish the health of Francophone minority communities as a legitimate field of research.
A vision for the future
After over 20 years of progress, Bouchard is now looking to begin a new phase of work: setting up a Canada-wide infrastructure that can provide long-term support for the creation, analysis and application of knowledge on the health of Francophone minority communities.
She’s calling for the creation of an observatory or centre of excellence to bring together data, expertise and best practices from across the country. That kind of infrastructure would enable existing databases to be used more effectively, support new data collection when needed and provide researchers and policymakers with vital insights for service planning.
“We’ve helped build a field of research,” says Bouchard. “The next challenge is to ensure it has the resources it needs to thrive. A well-supported observatory would allow us to get a better understanding of what we already know, identify what we still have to learn and produce knowledge that can truly be leveraged for action.”
For Bouchard, this award celebrates how far things have come. But more importantly, it serves as a reminder that Francophone communities still need sustainable capacity to produce and leverage knowledge in order to shape decisions affecting their care.
