I spent these two weeks thinking about a topic for my assignment and it was really challenging. There are so many public health issues and in the era of technology and the existence of many research tools, it is easy to get lost during bibliography research. The reason why I have decided to pursue this MPH program was my eager to improve the health and wellbeing of people worldwide, especially the most vulnerable ones and inspire young healthcare professionals to do the same. I found myself most of the time choosing topics about health inequities and the impact of the social determinants of health on the most vulnerable populations, having in mind the Dahlgren-Whitehead rainbow model. This time as well, I decided to choose a topic I most feel passionate about. Being myself an immigrant in Spain (I cannot understand why people from HIC who migrate in Spain are called expats, whereas the people from LMIC are called immigrants, I am from Tunisia, so I guess I am an immigrant.), I consider myself lucky because I came with a degree in pharmacy and I had my family support along the way, but this is not the case for all the immigrants here. I faced endless bureaucracy (if you do not have a legal residence, you do not have the right to health care access), sometimes racism (most of the times I found myself waiting longer times than native Spanish), while accessing to health care services. It is a doble edged sword as I am emotionally attached to this topic, which could bias the way I view and write about it but this can become a learning objective, learn how to embrace my bias and learn approaches to avoid and minimize it. I used PubMed for my litterature search and following the lecture we had in week 1, I chose the following key terms:
Immigrants – Non Native Spanish – Migrants
Healthcare – Wellbeing – Mental Health – Healthcare access
Inequalities – Inequity
Spain
I also added the filters English and publication date 10 years. I found around 54 articles:
Having had a look at the abstract, the articles I ended up choosing were the following:
Castano, J. et al. (2016) ‘Restricting Access to Health Care to Immigrants in Barcelona: A Mixed-Methods Study With Immigrants Who Have Experienced an Infectious Disease’, International Journal of Health Services, 46(2), pp. 241–261. doi:10.1177/0020731416637174.
Cayuela, A. et al. (2015) ‘The Impact of Education and Socioeconomic and Occupational Conditions on Self-Perceived and Mental Health Inequalities Among Immigrants and Native Workers in Spain’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 17(6), pp. 1906–1910. doi:10.1007/s10903-015-0219-8.
Gimeno-Feliu, L.A. et al. (2016) ‘Global healthcare use by immigrants in Spain according to morbidity burden, area of origin, and length of stay’, BMC Public Health, 16(1), p. 450. doi:10.1186/s12889-016-3127-5.
Henares-Montiel, J., Ruiz-Perez, I. and Mendoza-Garcia, O. (2018) ‘Health inequalities between male and female immigrants in Spain after the beginning of the economic crisis’, Health & Social Care in the Community, 26(6), pp. 891–897. doi:10.1111/hsc.12613.
Ledoux, C. et al. (2018) ‘Migrants’ access to healthcare services within the European Union: a content analysis of policy documents in Ireland, Portugal and Spain’, Globalization and Health, 14(1), p. 57. doi:10.1186/s12992-018-0373-6.
Llop-Gironés, A. et al. (2014) ‘Acceso a los servicios de salud de la población inmigrante en España’, Revista Española de Salud Pública, 88(6), pp. 715–734. doi:10.4321/S1135-57272014000600005.
Pinilla, J., Negrín, M.A. and Abásolo, I. (2019) ‘Trends in horizontal inequity in access to public health care services by immigrant condition in Spain (2006–2017)’, International Journal for Equity in Health, 18(1), p. 185. doi:10.1186/s12939-019-1092-1.
Porthé, V. et al. (2018) ‘Has the quality of health care for the immigrant population changed during the economic crisis in Catalonia (Spain)? Opinions of health professionals and immigrant users’, Gaceta Sanitaria, 32(5), pp. 425–432. doi:10.1016/j.gaceta.2017.03.010.
Rodríguez-Álvarez, E. et al. (2017) ‘Perceived discrimination and self-rated health in the immigrant population of the Basque Country, Spain’, Gaceta Sanitaria, 31(5), pp. 390–395. doi:10.1016/j.gaceta.2016.12.014.
Terraza-Núñez, R. et al. (2011) ‘Health professional perceptions regarding healthcare provision to immigrants in Catalonia’, International Journal of Public Health, 56(5), pp. 549–557. doi:10.1007/s00038-010-0223-7.
