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Migrant and seasonal farmworkers (MSFWs) have many health challenges due to the nature of their work, low wages, living conditions, mobility, and lack of health insurance. The purpose of this paper is to assess the availability of health services, barriers to accessing health care, and the prevalence of chronic conditions among MSFWs in Indiana.

A site-based convenience sample of MSFWs aged 14 years and older completed a cross-sectional survey. A total of 97 participants who currently or previously identified as farmworkers completed the questionnaire.

Almost one-third of the respondents reported no access to a health care provider. Of those, 43 percent reported that cost prevented them from seeking care. Of those who reported chronic conditions ( n=22), over 50 percent did not have access to a health care provider. These findings highlight the need to further investigate the magnitude of the problem and begin exploring ways to improve affordable health care access among MSFWs in Northeastern Indiana.

The results from this study highlight the need for the development and implementation of community health education programs that target MSFWs in Indiana. The findings, although not generalized, offer important insights into health care challenges and barriers to access in Indiana. The authors recommend that assistance programs should be implemented for providing affordable health care services for Hispanic MSFWs.

This study aims to provide a better understanding of Native American women veterans’ experiences with Veteran Administration and Indian Health Services. Eighteen interviews were conducted with special attention to the quality and quantity of health and mental health care services veterans accessed, the barriers and local contextual factors in accessing and utilizing services, and potential solutions to service gaps for women veterans from two Montana reservations, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation.

We examine the barriers and needs of Native American veterans in both reservations using qualitative methods. The research analyzed 18 interviews with women veterans from the Northern Cheyenne and Flathead reservations.

Native American women veterans identified a number of barriers to accessing care, some of which include lack of information regarding eligibility and the types of services available. Women often found the application process to be confusing and difficult. Other barriers included distance, cost of travel, and conflicts with their work schedule.

This exploratory case study served to clarify the challenges and obstacles Native American women veterans experience with accessing health and mental health services. This research revealed several patterns and themes in the experience of Native American women veterans in both reservation communities when attempting to access and seek care at Veterans Administration (VA) facilities and Indian Health Services (IHS). This research calls for policy changes and research to clarify how resources can be more efficiently and effectively distributed to rural veterans.

Little research has addressed the needs of Native American veterans. American Indians and Alaska Natives serve at a higher rate in the U.S. military than any other population. This research provides important information about Native American veterans who are often underrepresented in survey research, yet a rapidly growing segment of the United States military and veteran population.

A developing body of research has demonstrated the impact of racial residential segregation on a variety of negative health outcomes. However, little is known about the effect of residential segregation on access to health care.

This study utilizes multilevel binary logit models based on individual-level health data from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System linked to metropolitan-area level data to examine the association between Black-White segregation in 136 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and health-care coverage.

Overall, an increase in Black-White segregation is related to a decrease in the likelihood of having health insurance for Black residents and an increase in the Black-White gap in health-care coverage. These effects are substantial even when controlling for the effects of educational, social, and economic factors.

This study is the first to examine the impact of segregation on an individual's ability to access health-care coverage, which is an essential starting point for accessing health care in the United States.

Health disparities have been a growing concern in the USA. Differences in access to healthcare play a role in these health disparities. This article presents a model that illustrates access to healthcare in two rural Midwestern communities. The simulation model developed helps determine if people in these communities have equal access to health care and if physician’s insurance coverage practices prevent certain people from accessing care. From the simulation, it can be determined which characteristics may lead to the disparities in access to health care. Using the results of such a simulation model, the community may then begin to take action in order to ensure equal access to health care for all people within the community and help reduce health disparities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the levels of access to healthcare available to undocumented migrants in the Italian and British health systems through a comparative analysis of health policies for this population in these two national health systems.

It builds on textual and legal analysis to explore the different meanings that the principle of universal access to healthcare might have according to literature and legal documents in the field, especially those from the human rights domain. Then, the concept of universal access, in theory, is contrasted with actual health policies in each of the selected countries to establish its meaning in practice and according to the social context. The analysis relies on policy papers, data on health expenditure, legal statutes and administrative regulations and is informed by one research question: What background conditions better explain more universal and comprehensive health systems for undocumented migrants?

By answering this research question the paper concludes that the Italian health system is more comprehensive than the British health system insofar it guarantees access free of charge to different levels of care, including primary, emergency, preventive and maternity care, while the rule in the British health system is the recovering of charges for the provision of services, with few exceptions. One possible legal explanation for the differences in access between Italy and UK is the fact that the right to health is not recognised as a fundamental constitutional right in the latter as it is in the former.

The paper contributes to ongoing debates on Universal Health Coverage and migration, and dialogues with recent discussions on social justice and welfare state typologies.

Refugees commonly face inequitable access to health care services in their host country. This study aimed to identify factors influence refugee access to health services and to assess perceptions of barriers to health care for different refugee groups in Jordan.

In-depth interviews were combined with document analysis and analyzed using thematic and framework methods.

Findings highlighted inequitable access to health services between different refugee groups. Unlike Palestinian refugees from the West Bank, Palestinian refugees from Gaza faced financial barriers to access health care as a result of citizenship status, which affected their health insurance, referrals for health care and legal right to work. Syrian refugees similarly lacked Jordanian citizenship and health insurance and mainly depended on UNHCR for health services, though some were able to acquire work permits and pay for private care.

This study demonstrates a need for politically and economically appropriate policies to minimize the disparity of health care access among these refugee groups.

Undocumented migrants experience major legal constraints in their health-care access. Little is known on how undocumented migrants cope with these limitations in health-care access as individuals. The purpose of this study is to explore the coping responses of undocumented migrants when they experience limited health-care access in face-to-face encounters with health-care providers.

The authors conducted multi-site ethnographic observations and 25 semi-structured in-depth interviews with undocumented migrants in Belgium. They combined the “candidacy model” of health-care access with models from coping literature on racism as a framework. The candidacy model allowed them to understand access to health care as a dynamic and interactive negotiation process between health-care workers and undocumented migrants.

Responses to impaired health-care access can be divided into four main strategies: (1) individuals can react with a self-protective response withdrawing from seeking further care; (2) they can get around the obstacle; (3) they can influence the health-care worker involved by deploying discursive or performative skills; or (4) they can seek to confront the source of the obstacle.

These findings point to the importance of care relations and social networks, as well as discursive and performative skills of undocumented migrants when negotiating barriers in access to health care.

This study refines the candidacy model by highlighting how individuals respond on a micro-level to shifts towards exclusionary health policies and, by doing so dynamically, change provision of health-care services.

The influx of refugees and asylum-seekers over the past decade into the European Union creates challenges to the health systems of receiving countries in the preparedness and requisite adjustments to policy addressing the new needs of the migrant population. This study aims to examine and compare policies for access to health care and the related health outcomes for refugees and asylum-seekers settling both in the UK and Germany as host countries.

The paper conducted a scoping review of academic databases and grey literature for studies within the period 2010-2017, seeking to identify evidence from current policies and service provision for refugees and asylum-seekers in Germany and the UK, distilling the best practice and clarifying gaps in knowledge, to determine implications for policy.

Analysis reveals that legal entitlements for refugees and asylum-seekers allow access to primary and secondary health care free of charge in the UK versus a more restrictive policy of access limited to acute and emergency care during the first 15 months of resettlements in Germany. In both countries, many factors hinder the access of this group to normal health care from legal status, procedural hurdles and lingual and cultural barriers. Refugees and asylum-seeker populations were reported with poor general health condition, lower rates of utilization of health services and noticeable reliance on non-governmental organizations.

This paper helps to fulfill the need for an extensive research required to help decision makers in host countries to adjust health systems towards reducing health disparities and inequalities among refugees and asylum-seekers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between social capital (SC) and health care access problem among the older people in Bangladesh.

This study applied a random sampling method to select 310 older adults (all aged 60 years) in Bangladesh. Exploratory factor analysis was employed to extract SC dimensions. Logistic regression was applied to measure the association of SC dimensions and access.

The logistic regression result shows that with a one-unit increase in social network, norms of reciprocity, and civic participation, health care access problem will be decreased by OR= 0.732 (95% CI =0.529–1.014); OR=0.641 (95% CI = 0.447–0.919); and OR=0.748 (95% CI = 0.556–1.006) units. Respondents who have economic hardship were 3.211 (OR=3.211, CI = 0.84–5.59) times more likely to say that they had health care access problem compared with who had no economic hardship.

The study showed that the lower level of SC and presence of economic hardship increased the probability to health care access problem among the older people. Improving SC may be helpful in reducing health care access problem. However, economic hardship reductions are also important to reduce the health care access problem. Improving SC and reducing economic hardship thus should be implemented at the same time.

The study showed that low SC and economic hardship increased the probability to health care access problem. Improving SC may be helpful in reducing health inequity. However, economic hardship reductions also important to health care access. Therefore, improving SC and reducing economic hardship should be implemented at the same time.

This study has a great policy importance in regard to reducing health care access problem among the older adult in Bangladesh as SC has a potential to bring about a concomitant improvement in the condition of the health care access.

Access to health-care services for refugees are always impacted by many factors and strongly associated with population profile, nature of crisis and capacities of hosing countries. Throughout refugee’s crisis, the Jordanian Government has adopted several healthcare access policies to meet the health needs of Syrian refugees while maintaining the stability of the health-care system. The adopted health-care provision policies ranged from enabling to restricting and from affordable to unaffordable. The purpose of this paper is to identify the influence of restricted level of access to essential health services among Syrian refugees in Jordan.

This paper used findings of a cross-sectional surveys conducted over urban Syrian refugees in Jordan in 2017 and 2018 over two different health-care access policies. The first were inclusive and affordable, whereas the other considered very restricting policy owing to high inflation in health-care cost. Access indicators from four main thematic areas were selected including maternal health, family planning, child health and monthly access of household. A comparison between both years’ access indicators was conducted to understand access barriers and its impact.

The comparison between findings of both surveys shows a sudden shift in health-care access and utilization behaviors with increased barriers level thus increased health vulnerabilities. Additionally, the finding during implementation of restricted access policy proves the tendency among some refugees groups to adopt negative adaptation strategies to reduce health-care cost. The participants shifted to use a fragmented health-care, reduced or delayed care seeking and use drugs irrationally weather by self-medication or reduce drug intake.

Understanding access barriers to health services and its negative short-term and long-term impact on refugees’ health status as well as the extended risks to the host communities will help states that hosting refugees building rational access policy to protect whole community and save public health gains during and post crisis. Additionally, it will support donors to better mobilize resources according to the needs while the humanitarian actors and service providers will better contribute to the public health stability during refugee’s crisis.