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In general, newly resettled refugees have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes. This indicates that the society must make special efforts to enable refugees to attain health that is on a par with the rest of the population. The challenges rest primarily with employees in the public sector. But what resources do professionals need to meet the refugees’ health needs? This paper is about the need to develop strategies for professionals working with diversity and health, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees in Sweden. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the needs and obstacles in working with diversity and health for the newly resettled.

The paper is based on focus group interviews with 40 professionals working in three large municipalities and one County Administrative Board, all of whom work with challenges related to migration and health on a daily basis.

The needs expressed by the interviewees are primarily about developing and improving communications. Three important areas of communication were expressed: how information can be transferred from sender to receiver, institutionalization and interactions at different levels.

This paper identifies important needs and obstacles when working with diversity and health in Sweden, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees. It is an important contribution because refugees in general have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes and strategies to improve their health, therefore, need to be further developed.

Asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants’ access to healthcare vary in South Africa and Cape Town due to unclear legal status. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the source of this variation, the divergence between the 1996 South African Constitution, the immigration laws, and regulations and to describe its harmful consequences.

Based on legal and ethnographic research, this paper documents the disjuncture between South African statutes and regulations and the South African Constitution regarding refugees and migrants’ access to healthcare. Research involved examining South African jurisprudence, the African Charter, and United Nations’ materials regarding rights to health and health care access, and speaking with civil society organizations and healthcare providers. These sources inform the description of the immigrant access to healthcare in Cape Town, South Africa.

Asylum-seekers and refugees are entitled to health and emergency care; however, hospital administrators require documentation (up-to-date permits) before care can be administered. Many immigrants – especially the undocumented – are often unable to obtain care because of a lack of papers or because of “progressive realization,” the notion that the state cannot presently afford to provide treatment in accordance with constitutional rights. These explanations have put healthcare providers in an untenable position of not being able to treat patients, including some who face fatal conditions.

The research is limited by the fact that South African courts have not adjudicated a direct challenge to being refused care at healthcare facility on the basis of legal status. This limits the ability to know how rights afforded to “everyone” within the South African Constitution will be interpreted with respect to immigrants seeking healthcare. The research is also limited by the non-circulation of healthcare admissions policies among leading facilities in the Cape Town region where the case study is based.

Articulation of the disjuncture between the South African Constitution and the immigration laws and regulations allows stakeholders and decision-makers to reframe provincial and municipal policies about healthcare access in terms of constitutional rights and the practical limitations accommodated through progressive realization.

In South Africa, immigration statutes and regulations are inconsistent and deemed unconstitutional with respect to the treatment of undocumented migrants. Hospital administrators are narrowly interpreting the laws to instruct healthcare providers on how to treat patients and whom they can treat. These practices need to stop. Access to healthcare must be structured to comport with the constitutional right afforded to everyone, and with progressive realization pursued through a non – discriminatory policy regarding vulnerable immigrants.

This paper presents a unique case study that combines legal and social science methods to explore a common and acute question of health care access. The case is novel and instructive insofar as South Africa has not established refugee camps in response to rising numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. South Africans thus confront a “first world” question of equitable access to healthcare within their African context and with limited resources in a climate of increasing xenophobia.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Karen refugee women’s experience of resettlement and the factors which structured community capacity to support their mental health and well-being.

A postcolonial and feminist standpoint was used to bring Karen women’s voice to the knowledge production process. Data were collected through ethnographic field observation, in-depth semi-structured individual and focus group interviews with Karen women as well as healthcare and social service providers.

Three interrelated themes emerged from the data: Karen women’s construction of mental health as “stress and worry”; gender, language and health literacy intersected, shaping Karen women’s access to health care and social resources; flexible partnerships between settlement agencies, primary care and public health promoted community capacity but were challenged by neoliberalism.

Karen women and families are a diverse group with a unique historical context. Not all the findings are applicable across refugee women.

This paper highlights the social determinants of mental health for Karen women and community responses for mitigating psychological distress during resettlement.

Public health policy requires a contextualized understanding of refugee women’s mental health. Health promotion in resettlement must include culturally safe provision of health care to mitigate sources of psychological distress during resettlement.

This research brings a postcolonial and feminist analysis to community capacity as a public health strategy.

Immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees living in Europe face a number of challenges in accessing or using health information and healthcare services available in their host countries. To resolve these issues and deliver the necessary services, providers must take a comprehensive approach to better understand the types of health information and healthcare services that these individuals need, seek and use. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop that comprehensive approach.

In this paper, a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed publications was performed, with 3.013 articles collected from various databases. A total of 57 qualifying papers on studies conducted in Europe were included in the review after applying the predefined inclusion and exclusion requirements, screening processes and eliminating duplicates. The information seeking and communication model (ISCM) was used in the analysis.

The findings revealed that while many health information and healthcare services are accessible in Europe for immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, many of these individuals are unaware of their existence or how to access them. While our findings do not specify what health-related information these groups need, use or seek, they do suggest the importance and value of providing mental health, sexual health and HIV, as well as pregnancy and childbirth information and services. Furthermore, according to our results, health information services should be fact-based, easy to understand and raise awareness about healthcare structure and services available in Europe for this vulnerable population.

This study has a range of practical implications, including (1) highlighting the need for mental health and behavioural health services and (2) stressing the value of addressing cultural context and religious values while investigating (health) information seeking of people with foreign background.

This is one of the first studies to systematically review and examine the behaviour of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees in relation to health information and healthcare services in the European context.

The population of internationally forcibly displaced people, which includes refugees and asylum seekers, is large and heterogeneous. To determine the varying reasons for and experiences during the migration journey, including exposure to violence and health- and integration-related needs, there is an urgent need to involve children with refugee backgrounds in research and development activities. This chapter describes a model for the child participatory approach developed at Barnafrid, a national competence centre on violence against children at Linköping University in Sweden. The model has been tested in the Long Journey to Shelter study, which investigated exposure to violence and its consequences on mental health and functional ability among forcibly displaced children and young adults. As part of this project, we conducted workshops with children (n = 36, aged 13–18 years) to design a questionnaire on exposure to community violence in the country of resettlement. Experiences recounted during the child participatory workshops indicated no problems involving newly arrived children with refugee backgrounds and Swedish-born adolescents in research activities. However, attention should be paid to proper preparatory work and the need for adjustments. We discuss the results in light of other studies on refugee child participation, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child and diversity considerations.

This article aims at the sociological inquiry seeking to identify meanings ascribed to the term of vulnerability by official spokespersons, to explore a novel public health policy with reference to vulnerable populations and to trace its enactment with particular attention to vulnerable populations in Greece; finally a case of contest among the state and the civil society over refugees' rights will be located against public health politics and biopolitics in the context of the pandemic Covid-19.

The interpretivist perspective towards analysis of textual data is adopted. Discourse analysis and content analysis are applied to analyze four sets of data.

The main findings show: (1) ambiguity over the terminology, (2) insufficient policy design and policy enactment towards the protection of vulnerable populations' health, (3) an illuminative case of contest among civil society and the state against infringement of refugees' human rights which may interpreted in terms of a tradition of solidarity.

The Foucauldian notion of biopolitics provides the grounds to understanding how market prevails over life at the expense of those in greater need, and how the state, serving homo economicus, intensifies instead of alleviating health vulnerabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to map and analyse the literature from 1989 to 2016 on humanitarian supply chain management (SCM) responding to refugees. This literature review systematically assesses existing literature, thereby highlighting gaps, challenges and directions for future research.

The authors apply a structured content analysis method which has been recognised as a traceable, systematic and reproducible research tool to analyse qualitative and quantitative aspects of existing literature.

The relative scarcity of literature implies that the interface of the fields of Humanitarian SCM and refugees has been rarely addressed. More specifically, the quantitative content analysis highlights a dearth of research that focusses on both fields in a well-balanced manner. In particular, empirical, practice-led studies, as well as research on development aid operations are under-represented. The qualitative analysis finds that further research on logistics models as well as technological innovations is necessary to increase data availability, forecast accuracy and the efficiency of (local) supply network operations during disasters.

The review suggests a number of areas in need of future research, proposes possibilities of collaborations between different actors and provides a research agenda for Humanitarian SCM in the context of refugees.

This review is the first to analyse the literature on Humanitarian SCM related to refugees.

In South Africa, the majority of the population struggles to access care and support for mental health challenges. Drawing on challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees in the urban margins of Johannesburg, this paper aims to explore the relationship between migration and mental health through a lens of heightened vulnerability, precarious urban spaces and unmet basic needs.

Remote interviews were conducted with respondents working in the mental health-care sector (public and private) and with migrant communities in Johannesburg. Respondents were identified via purposive sampling and interviews were conducted in English. Key findings were identified using thematic analysis.

Effective responses to asylum seekers and refugees facing mental health challenges are based on an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs such as paying rent, finding employment and providing for families. These “daily stressors” not only compound “extreme traumatisation” but are a form of trauma in and of itself.

This paper shows how alternative responses determined by an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs provide critical and potentially far-reaching interventions. Locating trauma in the unmet needs, precarious urban spaces and marginalisation opens up space to further question the ways that migration and mental health shape and reshape one another.