It's an excellent question. The particular region where your riding is located does have such diversity.
One of the things that emerged very clearly from our research was the need for cultural sensitivity training for many staff providing services to older adults, among others. A level of cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity training was needed to recognize situations—even like the one that Vanessa used as an example—where people may have a different level of comfort with those language barriers. There is also the need to provide a lot of those services in other languages or in more accessible formats.
That came up a great deal in our research. One of our biggest challenges was trying to collect data from individuals who either weren't comfortable in the English language or weren't comfortable, culturally, talking about loneliness or isolation. In one of the languages, which may have been Mandarin, there was no direct translation for the word “lonely”. It was referred to in a roundabout way, but there wasn't an actual word. There wasn't a way to talk about this concept, particularly not for the research team who didn't speak the language. Even for our translators and interpreters, there was that barrier. Conceptually, that topic was not one they would commonly want to discuss.
Some of the key recommendations emerge about how to recognize where those barriers might be in place, and how to put in a variety of solutions to help address them. These could include translating materials, different kinds of accessibility, interpreters and those kinds of things.