IOM: Health and Reintegration - Returning to Space but not to Time: A Life Course Approach to Migrants’ Health, Continuity of Care and Impact on Reintegration Outcomes
January 2023
Good health and well-being for all is a basic human right. Central to good health and well-being is access to integrated care. Efforts to realize this right and to improve access to care however often exclude migrants, even when migrants have returned to their country of origin. According to IOM, 58% of migrants in a vulnerable situation assisted to return in 2021 presented health-related needs.
Samuel Hall in partnership with EU- IOM Knowledge Management Hub and the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa funded by the European Union conducted a study to explore the links between health needs, access to care and sustainable reintegration of returnees. The study followed a mixed methods approach, conducted between March and July 2022, in six selected countries (Brazil, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Georgia, Pakistan and Senegal).
There were four main objectives that link the returnees’ individual health-related needs (including with regards to mental health) with the capacities and infrastructures for health services in the external environment, to learn from existing practices and recommend how to improve the operationalization and standards on health provision in reintegration settings across countries of origin. Returnees face additional barriers to health-care access, on top of those shared by the general population. Along with risks due to the migration journey, exposure to harmful environments results in ‘dual burdens’.
There is an urgent need to build a continuum of care across different stages of the migration cycle while also funding gender specific initiatives on return and reintegration. The full report provides an analysis of the health needs of returnees and its impact on reintegration outcomes and further recommendations based on the mixed methods study.