Week 2 wrap up

We hope you have found this week’s content interesting. Thanks a lot for the good contributions that you have made to the discussions!

We have discussed that every human being should have equal rights to health care, but often equal rights are not granted for refugee populations due to legal, logistical or financial barriers. Even if there is equal legal access to health care, logistical or financial barriers put refugees in a situation where their access is usually not equitable. While the term equality is used about treating everyone alike, equity is usually understood as trying to reach the same level for different groups, for example related to access to health care. This means the more vulnerable a group is, the more should be done for this group. With respect to refugee health this means extra effort in order to cross language and cultural barriers from the health care provider’s side.

There are two ways to overcome this. One would be to work outside the health system through the voluntary sector; this can be called a humanitarian approach. But this approach relies on the dedication and availability of individuals and may therefore result in an inconsistent offer of services, and refugees can be seen as “recipients” of welfare. The alternative is a rights-based approach, based on the inalienable “right to health” and the “highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being” (as proposed in the constitution of the World Health Organization). This approach demands that health equity for refugees should not be dependent on presence or absence of voluntary efforts but rather be granted and provided by government legislation and formal health system. Health workers can take roles within both approaches, and those who are involved in both approaches often feel they can increase their impact in one field through their experience and insight into the other.

Refugees and asylum seekers may be traumatized by the events that caused them to flee from their country of origin. Another group of traumatized patients (partly overlapping with the groups mentioned this week) are survivors of torture. Next week we will focus on how health professionals can assist this particularly vulnerable group.