Migrants’ encounters with Swedish health care

The Health and Medical Services Act prescribes Sweden’s national goals of good health and care for its entire population. However, “care and health are not equal” according to the country’s National Board of Health and Welfare. The long-term trend is that public health is improving, but there are still significant health and care differences between women and men, between those with long and short education and between foreign and domestic born Swedes.

This report summarizes five recent doctoral dissertations, all with different perspectives on Migrants’ encounters with Swedish health care. The researchers shed light on how Swedish healthcare diagnoses, classifies, registers, informs, consults and treats migrants in various states and conditions between life and death. Each chapter concludes with recommendations for improvements aimed at various aspects of migrants’ encounters with Swedish health and medical care. A recurring theme is the importance of communication, as lack of communication between care recipients and caregivers contributes to misunderstandings, oversights, neglected crucial information and erroneous decisions that in some cases have fatal consequences.

Among other recommendations, the researchers in the report propose:

That the number of completed health examinations of asylum seekers will increase if today’s voluntary and regionally organized health examination of asylum seekers is transformed into a national, state-funded and organized system for health-oriented reception of migrants
That care providers in Sweden become more “health literate” and professionally aware of the health-related importance of their care recipients’ “health literacy”; that is, their ability to access, understand, communicate, evaluate and use health information
To make greater use of easily accessible digital technology such as mobile phones and mobile apps, to better guarantee the right to an interpreter in care meetings, and to achieve better results in self-care of diseases such as type 2 diabetes

It is Delmi’s hope that the knowledge reported will contribute to a deeper interest in how we jointly can strengthen public health in the age of globalization, and that the report can stimulate a general discussion on how resources can be distributed and used to enable more sustainable living conditions and healthier Swedes, regardless of their geographical and national starting points.

The authors participating in the anthology are Juliet Aweko, Ulrika Byrskog, Annika Esscher, Robert Jonzon and Josefin Wångdahl. Editors are Delmi’s research coordinators André Asplund, Raoul Galli, Iris Luthman and Sara Thalberg.

The report is only available in Swedish.

Picture by Darko Stojanovic from Pixabay.

Migrants’ encounters with Swedish health care

Among other recommendations, the researchers in the report propose:

Download the report (only available in Swedish)

Previous publications in Delmi's Dissertation Series

Children and migration

The pathway to work