Essential Work, Inadequate Resources: An Intersectionality‐Based Policy Analysis of Caregiving for Older Adults in British Columbia

Unpaid caregivers of older adults with chronic conditions sustain Canada’s health and social care system while remaining chronically under‐supported. In British Columbia (BC), Canada, provincial and federal programs include caregiver support policies, but there is a lack of evidence of how such policies interact with caregivers’ burdens and responsibilities. This study examines how care‐related policies and programs interact with experiences of caregiving, and how these interactions are further shaped by caregiver social locations. Using qualitative lived experience policy analysis design grounded in an Intersectionality‐Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) framework, we conducted semistructured interviews with 18 unpaid caregivers across BC. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling to ensure diversity across community type, ethnocultural background, immigration status, gender, income, and caregiving relationship. Data were analyzed in NVivo 14 using dual inductive–deductive coding. Results produced three nested themes. First, BC’s formal support infrastructure was described as fragmented, administratively burdensome, and misaligned with the relational demands of intensive home‐based care. Second, this inadequacy was experienced as inequitably distributed: respondents in rural and remote communities, recent immigrants, speakers of languages other than English, low‐income caregivers, and those navigating diagnostic stigma or gendered labor expectations faced compounding barriers, such that programs formally available to all were in practice exclusionary. Third, participants described detailed structural knowledge of policy gaps and articulated specific reform priorities: income‐based financial instruments, flexible service mandates, proactive cultural and linguistic accessibility, formal rights frameworks, and workforce investment. Participant accounts describe BC’s caregiver support programs as producing inequitable outcomes not incidentally but due to design characteristics. This suggests that incremental adjustments are insufficient; structural reform informed by the lived experience of those most marginalized is required. The lived experience of caregivers demonstrates how generalized programs generate systematic inequities and positions caregiver support policy as a site of structural failure requiring urgent attention.