This report was published by the Pathways to Care Project, Black Health Alliance.

HERE’S HOW THE AUTHORS DESCRIBE THIS REPORT:

This report aims to provide an overview of the findings from the Pathways to Care focus groups. Since the beginning of the Pathways to Care project, we have been fortunate to work with numerous Black youth, community members, and service providers. Some participated as committee members and contributed to our project’s initiatives, while others were focus group participants. Many more were community leaders who connected us with potential participants and other community organizations. We all shared a common goal to understand the needs of Black youth seeking care, because we recognized the specific challenges they face growing up in a structurally racist society. We also witnessed how those challenges were compounded by a system that is ill-equipped to respond to the experiences of anti-Black racism (ABR) and which, in some cases, perpetuated ABR itself. To have a complete understanding, we used focus groups to speak directly to Black youth, their communities, and their service providers.

In February 2020, we published a scoping review on the barriers and facilitators to care for Black children and youth in Canada. The scoping review explored what other journal articles and community organizations identified as barriers to care. We looked at 1,700 articles, of which 23 spoke specifically to the experiences of Black youth.

We found that Black youth experienced systemic barriers to care, including wait times and geographic and financial barriers. We also found that Black youth had difficulty accessing mental health professionals, including Black mental healthcare providers.

In this report, we aim to build on and go beyond what we learned in the scoping review and learn first-hand what the challenges are for Black youth attempting to access care. Moreover, we identify what Black youth, their communities, and service providers thought were the solutions to increasing access to care.