Project description
Language and cultural barriers in ageing migrant healthcare
A study in Switzerland shows that southwestern European immigrants face a surprising paradox: despite successful socioeconomic integration, they report some of the poorest health outcomes among foreign-born populations. One reason is communication, as most immigrant residents face language and cultural barriers. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ACROSS-CARE project aims to explore the challenges faced by Spanish-Galician migrants aged 75 and older throughout their migration journey. It will compare retirees who live in Switzerland, those who return to Spain, and cross-border commuters. The project will examine how communication and intercultural barriers create disparities, and how integrating migrants’ multilingual skills into clinical consultations can help address them. It will also provide guidelines for other migrant communities in Europe.
Objective
ACROSS-CARE investigates how older Spanish-Galician migrants (>75 years) experience and address linguistic and intercultural barriers in primary and long-term care within German-speaking Switzerland. The project analyses these challenges across the full migration cycle by comparing three trajectories: migrants who remain in the host country after retirement, returnees to Spain, and cross-border commuters.
The project addresses a significant paradox: despite strong socioeconomic integration, long-term Southwestern European migrants report the poorest health status among all foreign-born residents in Switzerland. It explores how communication and intercultural barriers contribute to these disparities and how they can be mitigated by connecting clinical consultations to migrants' everyday multilingual repertoires and institutional expectations. The methodology employs a mixed-methods and multi-actor design, combining sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and sociopragmatics. Evidence will be gathered from (i) semi-structured interviews with migrants and key stakeholders, (ii) audio-recorded primary care consultations, and (iii) ethnographic observation. The project will analyse how communication barriers and coping strategies evolve over the life course and manifest in medical settings in older age, assessing outcomes from both user and provider perspectives. This analysis will yield two key outputs: first, evidence-informed, locally adapted guidelines for multilingual communication to support migrants, professional training, service design, and policy; and second, a transferable mixed-data methodology for studying other migrant communities across Europe.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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8006 Zurich
Switzerland
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