Opportunities and challenges in providing health care for International Retirement Migrants: a qualitative case study of Canadians travelling to Yuma, Arizona
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Increasing numbers of older individuals opt to spend extended time abroad each year for lifestyle, health, and financial reasons. This practice is known as international retirement migration, and it is particularly popular among retirees in Global North countries such as Canada. Despite the popularity of international retirement migration, very little is known about how and why health care is accessed while abroad, nor the opportunities and challenges posed for destination hospitals. In this article we focus on addressing the latter knowledge gap. METHODS: This qualitative case study is focused on the only hospital in Yuma, Arizona - a popular destination for Canadian retirement migrants in the United States. We conducted focus groups with workers at this hospital to explore their experiences of treating this transnational patient group. Twenty-seven people participated in three, 90-min focus groups: twelve nurses, six physicians, and nine administrators. Thematic analysis of the focus group transcripts was conducted using a triangulated approach. RESULTS: Participants identified three care environments: practice, transnational, and community. Each environment presents specific opportunities and challenges pertaining to treating Canadian retirement migrants. Important opportunities include the creation of a strong and diverse seasonal workforce in the hospital, new transnational paths of communication and information sharing for physicians and health administrators, and informal care networks that support formal health care services within and beyond the hospital. These opportunities are balanced out by billing, practical, administrative, and lifestyle-related challenges which add complexity to treating this group of transnational patients. CONCLUSION: Canadians represent a significant group of patients treated in Yuma, Arizona. This is contrary to long-standing, existing research that depicts older Canadians as being reluctant to access care while in the United States. Significant overlaps exist between the opportunities and challenges in the practice, transnational and community environments. More research is needed to better understand if these findings are similar to other destinations popular with Canadian international retirement migrants or if they are unique to Yuma, Arizona.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".