Immigrant health care issues in Portugal
Access to adequate health care is an essential human right. However, increasing poverty in Portugal has had a major impact on such access, particularly in economically excluded populations such as immigrants and their descendants. The EU-funded PSYSPOCUC project was established to investigate this problem in Lisbon, a major urban centre. They applied a participatory research approach to better understand the imbalance of power in the current public health system. PSYSPOCUC conducted focus groups with leaders of public health organisations, both governmental and private, as well as community leaders. This information was supplemented with surveys conducted among native and immigrant health care users and in-depth interviews with doctors and nurses. The project confirmed major inequalities in terms of access to and quality of health care. These include problems with access to medicines, difficulties in securing regular appointments and increasing costs of health care. Researchers identified the socioeconomic status of immigrants as the root cause. Many of those interviewed were unemployed and reported issues with providing enough food for their families. They hence concluded that Portugal's public health care system was discriminatory on the basis of socioeconomic status rather than ethnicity. To address this, the country needs to place an emphasis on equity in health care, instead of concentrating on narrow cultural views of diversity.
Keywords
Immigrant, public health, socioeconomic status, inequality, culturally diverse
