Further perspectives on issues of entitlement and access

Citation

Watters, C. (2011), "Further perspectives on issues of entitlement and access", International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmhsc.2011.54807daa.001

Further perspectives on issues of entitlement and access

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, Volume 7, Issue 4

The papers in this volume offer further insight into the thorny issues of entitlement and access to health and social services for migrant populations. They offer distinctive contributions, not only by providing a welcome account challenges faced by migrants from diverse backgrounds in the USA and the hitherto underresearched populations of Latin Americans in the UK, but through casting light of the complexities involved in questions of access. Tuepker and colleagues address the fundamentals of providing community health to migrant populations by addressing the question of who is out there with respect to African populations. They provide an example of the value of using multiple data sources to estimate the African population. They also offer a further interesting perspective by estimating the size of the community by engaging with the African migrant own definitions of their community. Halberstein draws on an epidemiological profiling of Caribbean-Americans to point to indicators of some success in the health care of a migrant population. He points out that Caribbean-Americans in Miami has a disease profile that is better than many immigrant groups and more like that of the general population. This, he attributes partly to an integration of traditional and biomedical healthcare and the provision of receptive health services. Robila and Sandberg offer insight into another migrant population in the USA, Eastern Europeans and addresses specifically questions of access to family therapy services. They demonstrate that access to these services is crucially interdependent with the wider contexts of Easter European migrants lives. A range of parallel issues is addressed in Gideon’s paper on Latin American migrants access to healthcare in London. This group is rarely featured in the extensive literature on migrant health in the UK and Gideon provides compelling evidence of the need for healthcare providers and researchers to build on her work.

Charles Watters