Promoting healthy futures in a rural refugee resettlement location: A community-based participatory research intervention

Abstract

The resettlement of refugees in rural areas is presenting new challenges for healthcare. This article reports on a community-based participatory research project that explored understandings of health and care across the life course in a refugee-background community in regional south-east Australia. Participants identified key challenges, including lack of access to local services that address their complex needs and problems created by communicating across languages, cultures, and ontologies. Clear opportunities were identified for improving local health services to meet the needs of refugee-background communities. Building on participant recommendations, we argue that appropriate, high-quality healthcare requires the cultivation of dialogue and respect across different understandings of health and care. We suggest that approaches grounded in an ethos of collaboration, power-sharing and dialogue provide a way forward, not just for research, but for embedding practices of cultural safety in rural and regional resettlement.

A scoping review on the barriers to and facilitators of health services utilisation related to refugee settlement in regional or rural areas of the host country

“…Most studies looked at health access generally, although one study speci cally examined the spatial accessibility of public dental services relative to the refugee population [20], while another reported on the major outcomes faced by mental health professionals working in the Rohingya humanitarian response [21]. Access to health services studied included all services, including local and governmental ones [19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], primary, secondary, and hospital [13,21,29,31], mental [32,33], mobile [34,35], maternal and child health services [36], dental [20], online [24,37,38] and Médecins Sans Frontières [39].…”

Introduction to the special issue – Imagining rural futures in times of uncertainty and possibility: Progressing a transformative research agenda for rural sociology

“…In the following article, Nunn et al (2021) concentrate on developing understandings of healthcare in rural and regional settings as ideal locales in which real, transformative change can occur in how healthcare is delivered. Placing cultural diversity at the centre in their analysis, these researchers employed a community-based participatory approach to working with members of the Karen migrant community in one regional centre in Australia.…”

Estrategias de apropiación social del conocimiento en salud: revisión sistemática

“…Para esta fase, algunos artículos reportaron un estudio piloto, donde se motivó la participación con incentivos económicos o alimenticios (24,36,48,59). En múltiples ocasiones, las intervenciones las efectuaron los líderes de la comunidad o facilitadores diferentes a los investigadores, con previa capacitación (35,39,44,46,53).…”

“…Algunas de las intervenciones se desarrollaron en varios grupos focales, según los criterios de los investigadores, o en un solo grupo, con todos los participantes (29,46,51). Asimismo, hubo un seguimiento periódico de la población intervenida, tanto durante como después de la intervención (28,37,39,42,45,50,51,59). Además de ello, en dos ocasiones, se intervino en sitios de trabajo, por lo que se publicó información relevante a la temática en las carteleras de la organización (42,45).…”

“…La última fase de las estrategias de intervención contempló la evaluación. Para este proceso se utilizaron diferentes métodos; sin embargo, el más utilizado fue el análisis cualitativo de los grupos focales y entrevistas semiestructuradas, que evaluó la factibilidad, satisfacción, aceptación, percepciones sobre la implementación y los índices de deseo para apoyar la sostenibilidad de la estrategia en la comunidad (25,28,36,37,(43)(44)(45)50,53,59). En esta fase se utilizó la evaluación de conocimientos y resultados en salud (índice de masa corporal, hemoglobina glicosilada y tiempo de actividad física) para determinar la eficacia de las estrategias ( (33,61).…”