Refugee Component

In this section, we report on our findings related to access to care for newly arrived refugees and visible minority patients. There is an overwhelming desire of health care providers to understand and appropriately respond to the needs of these groups of patients. There is also a felt lack of infrastructural support to assist staff who are struggling to do the right thing.

 

Note, this section will refer to a collaboration between Memorial University’s Family Practice Unit, volunteer medical students through the MUN MED Gateway Project, the Public Health Nurse, and the Association for New Canadians that has resulted in the Refugee Health Collaborative. It will also discuss other relevant health care units, facilities, and community groups. For a complete history and description of these groups and projects, please refer to the full report.

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➤ Diversity Champions in Eastern Health
 

“I’m trying to make this up – I’m flying the plane as we’re building it” [Nurse 2]
 

A number of informal initiatives have been adopted throughout Eastern Health, by individuals whom we term diversity “champions” who have creatively found solutions to challenges with the provision of health care to newly arrived refugees. In the absence of clear direction with respect to diversity programming, they have been independently educating themselves on particular topics and providing informal peer training for other staff, in an effort to ensure that refugee patients are being treated in a manner that is culturally competent and culturally safe.

 

We heard many stories of health care workers going “above and beyond” their normal responsibilities in order to ensure that care was being provided. These diversity champions had identified specific needs within the refugee patient population, which they had attempted to meet, often successfully. But what was missing, they reported, was accountability and oversight, a structure through which various concerns and challenges and solutions could be brought forward and addressed in a systems-wide approach. 

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➤ Additional Advocacy Areas

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“It’s daily. I mean some days maybe it’s just 1 hour and then other days it might be 6 or 7 or 8 hours. It could be more … One of the children was sick they called me, it was very late at night. I stayed all night at the hospital until she was admitted” [Informal support worker 1]

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Various community-based formal support agencies (such as the Association for New Canadians [ANC] and the Refugee and Immigrant Advisory Council [RIAC]) have supported and advocated for refugees and other newcomers to the province. In addition, many community-embedded informal patient supporters also assist refugee resettlement as non-professional volunteers. These volunteers support privately sponsored refugees and other newcomers who are assumed to fall outside of the jurisdiction of the ANC. This raises concerns over confidentiality. It also indicates some confusion over the mandate of the ANC.