Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Patient-Oriented Research

Initiatives like "A Black Health Plan for Ontario" and "Black Equity in Alberta Rainforest Initiatives" aim to improve health equity for Black older adults (BOAs) by looking at their unmet needs in areas like mental health, environment, finances, personal care, physical health, emotional well-being, and social support. However, these needs change over time at individual, community, and societal levels. This means we need to keep reporting on health inequities and have ongoing discussions to create recommendations based on Black experiences, focusing on access, affordability, quality, and culturally appropriate care. In our four-year project, our goal is to gather and analyze evidence from the experiences of BOAs and their families regarding unmet care needs while also developing and testing the "Black-Focused Interactive Repository for Actionable Voices and Engagement" (BiRAVE) in Toronto, Halifax, and Winnipeg. We will achieve this goal in two steps. First, we plan to recruit 90 BOAs and 90 family members (30 BOAs and 30 family members from each city). Each participant will take part in at least two interviews to discuss their unmet needs related to health inequalities, including access, affordability, quality, and culturally appropriate care. Second, we will develop and test BiRAVE, which has three parts: Reporting, Recommendations/Solutions, and Engagement. We will invite 90 participants (30 from each city - 10 BOAs, 10 family members, 5 health/social professionals, and 5 policymakers) to participate in the development and usability testing. The usability will involve in person direct observation and task performance sessions lasting 2 hours. Afterward, they will discuss their experiences using BiRAVE and complete the System Usability Scale (SUS) to measure satisfaction. We will analyze the data, summarizing SUS scores by sex and gender. BiRAVE will provide a place where BOAs and their family members will continuously report health inequity they face.