Canadian Association on Gerontology Webinar Series The structural burden of system navigation on families of older adults Dr. Laura Funk University of Manitoba Thursday, April 16, 2020 12:00-1:00pm Eastern time Registration is free! Register Now: https://form.jotform.com/93054581903256 Dr. Funk will present findings from her research into how families of older adults navigate health and social service systems, using data from 100 in-person interviews with 32 family carers and 22 formal navigators. Findings illustrate how navigation work can contribute to structural burden, in part through carers’ emotional responses to navigation challenges as well as through the emotion work required to navigate services. Navigation challenges cost excess time and energy, and have consequences for access to formal supports, raising concerns about how care systems which place the onus for this work on families can support equity goals. Formal, public service navigators, where available, need dedicated time and ability to help broker and advocate using family-centric approaches. Discussion will focus on identifying opportunities to engage our collective, public responsibility to address system navigation challenges. Dr. Laura Funk Dr. Funk is a sociologist and social gerontologist, and Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba. Her scholarship explores how older adults and paid and unpaid carers interpret experiences, preserve identities, and negotiate normative ideals, and how such processes use and reinforce discourses of age, care and responsibility. In addition, her work interrogates structures of care for older adults and the pressing, often invisible impacts on paid and unpaid carers in the context of decades of health reform in Canada. Dr. Funk is the 2019 recipient of the CAG Recognition Award for Excellence in Research on Unpaid Caregiving: In Honour of Neena Chappell. To manage subscriptions/passwords, or view archives, go to http://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/click4hp.html . [log in to unmask] is run in collaboration with Health Nexus: http://www.healthnexus.ca/index_eng.php