1st Edition
Migrants and Health Political and Institutional Responses to Cultural Diversity in Health Systems
Integrating newcomers and minorities into the social fabric of receiving countries has become one of the crucial challenges of contemporary Western societies. This volume seeks to understand patterns of changing institutional practices and public policies where the challenges of including cultural diversity into the social fabric are most pronounced: namely the health care system. In recent years, pro-migrant organizations and anti-racist activists have repeatedly voiced and politicized demands to improve migrants' access to the health-care system giving rise to a lively debate about migrants' access to health-care and responsiveness of institutions to their needs. In a nutshell the book achieves the following: - Provides a conceptual framework to link patterns of political advocacy/mobilization and processes of migrants' socio-political inclusion - Integrates the (multi-disciplinary) literature on political mobilization and accommodating cultural diversity in an innovative fashion - Presents a comparative study on accommodating diversity in the health care system from a comparative transatlantic perspective - Generates insight into best practices in the health care system that will be of interest to scholars as well as practitioners in the field. The analysis of health care provision offers an opportunity to test new public policy strategies and the policy consequences of the now widespread aspiration to include citizens more fully in designing and implementing them.
Biography
Dr Christiane Falge, Institut für Interkulturelle und Internationale Studien (InIIS), Germany, Professor Carlo Ruzza, University of Leicester, UK and Professor Oliver Schmidtke, Director of the European Studies Program, University of Victoria, Canada
'The relationship between immigrants and health has become a "hot"topic. This book is therefore exceedingly timely and valuable in its comparative approach, exploring how migrants in three different host societies - Canada, Germany, and Italy - access health care resources as well as how the health care system responds to increasing population diversity. These authors clearly demonstrate that locality matters and that structure and agency must both be considered in the analysis of the migrant experience.' Caroline B. Brettell, Southern Methodist University, USA 'A book on diversity and its management in health care is long overdue. Our routine health services must improve their ability to cater fairly and equally for all members of society, including migrants...a timely contribution to this important debate.' Oliver Razum, Bielefeld University, Germany 'Health care has become the ground on which political and moral claims about human rights and cultural diversity are put to the test. The merit of this book is to demonstrate empirically how migrant groups in Canada, Germany and Italy are mobilizing strategies and resources in their mostly urban-based struggles for social inclusion and well-being in an increasingly interconnected yet disparate world.' Hansjörg Dilger, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
