Primary Care for Minorities including Refugees and Immigrants – EFPC Working Group

On request of its members, for example, the Ghent and Slovak members who met in Bojnice, Slovakia, the EFPC started a few years ago a Working Group on Primary Care for minority groups. A first topic was how to offer care to Roma patients. This has resulted in a Position Paper produced by Dr. Danica Rotar and Dr. Pim de Graaf. This document provides guidance for the discussion on how to provide appropriate care for Roma patients and is published in the Slovenian Journal of Public Health.

A new paper needs to be developed with a publication in the official EFPC journal Primary Health Care Research & Development. Please join the Working Group at PIE!

EFPC members are based in virtually all European countries – Eastern, Central and Western Europe. All counties are confronted with large numbers of minorities, be it Russians in the Baltic states or Roma in Slovenia. Recently the new large influx of refugees from the Middle East was another reason to make sure that Primary Care is well equipped and well organized to provide appropriate care. Together with a number of EFPC members and led by its’ member from Greece, University of Crete, it developed a project to improve care for this refugee population. The EUR-HUMAN (“EUropean Refugees – HUman Movement and Advisory Network”) project was awarded by the European Commission DG Sante in the framework of the call for Proposals on “Support Member States under particular migratory pressure in their response to health-related challenges” and introduces new tools in 2016 for Primary Care providers in Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Austria. The EFPC was responsible for the Work Package 7 for the Monitoring & Evaluation part. Pim de Graaf and Diana Castro Sandoval act as experts.

The overall aim of the EUR-HUMAN project was to enhance the capacity, knowledge and expertise of European member states who accept refugees and migrants in addressing their health needs safeguard them from risks, while at the same time to minimize cross-border health risks. The existing European and international experience has been systematically reviewed to identify effective interventions to vulnerable groups and tools for the initial health care needs assessment of the arriving refugees including mental, psychosocial and physical health. The initiative focused on addressing both the early arrival period and the longer-term settlement of refugees in European host countries. The outputs of the project and pilot testing is transferable to all EU countries, in particular, those serving as major host countries to refugees with the understanding that some local adaptation will be necessary to fit local conditions.