The document titled “Saúde em Equidade” serves as a manual of clinical cases for health professionals working in culturally diverse contexts. Carla Moleiro, one of the coordinators, explained that the guide aims to provide professionals servicing immigrant communities with “tools to reduce inequality in healthcare access.”
Carla Moleiro advocates for continuous training for doctors and technicians, the integration of cultural mediators in health center teams, and adapting clinical protocols to meet patients’ sociocultural diversity.
Supported by the Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund (AMIF), the study was conducted during the pandemic and gathered several testimonials of best practices and advice for dealing with immigrants who “bring their own culture” and possess a “holistic view” of health that differs from Western practices.
“Often, prescriptions need to be accompanied by an explanation or even propose an alternative therapeutic solution, due to the vastly differing health habits.”
“Immigrants tend to have poorer health outcomes,” partly because “there is a mismatch between their health perspectives from their home countries and the Western medicine perspective,” which is heavily reliant on drug prescriptions rather than habit or behavior changes.
The manual “addresses diverse issues such as mental health, child care, and sexual orientation questions,” the researcher exemplified.
Currently, ensuring “the same care for all in health services may appear fair,” but this approach “overlooks cultural, social, and economic differences of patients, leading to inadequate care and the frequent perpetuation of the inequalities they aim to combat,” the researchers note.
Hence, they propose training for professionals to recognize the “growing diversity of clinical contexts, especially concerning migrant populations.”
“This work originates from listening and reflecting, done in collaboration,” Carla Moleiro explained.
The project included several training modules with shared “real cases that now make up the manual’s content” and “these are clinical stories that clearly depict how inequalities occur in the field,” the researcher stated.
“Every clinical encounter is inevitably an intercultural encounter,” and the “quality of this relationship can be crucial for the success of the care provided,” she emphasized.
