The socio-health geriatricization of disability: institutional power struggles and clash of categorical representations
Through a socio-historical anthropological approach and a focus on technics and devices for the evaluation and management of access to home services and long-term accommodation duration, this article retraces a persistant trend towards the medically centered geriatricization of the assessment and management of disability. This geriatricization tends to assimilate and equate people with disabilities and the elderly with a loss of autonomy as dependent populations to be supported within the Quebec socio-health system. The management of the socio-health crisis of COVID 19 by Quebec’s public administration in 2020 was marked by the invisibilization of the pandemic’s consequences on people with disabilities. The attention was focused on the dramatic and deadly outbreaks of elderly people with a geriatric profile in elderly home care facilities (CHSLD). The astonishment of those working in the field of disability caused by this blind spot in public health reached its peak with the unveiling of triage protocols designed on the basis of geriatric scales of fragility and dependency incompatible with the social and human rights models of disability, which have inspired Quebec policies in this area for over three decades.