The Exploration of Historical, Cultural, and Healthcare Utilization Factors When Clinically Treating Refugee Patients: Healthcare Providers’ View

The objective of this project is to explore historical, cultural, and healthcare utilization factors that are significant to healthcare providers in their practice to clinically treat refugee patients holistically and equitably. Semi-structured interviews supported by a pre-interview questionnaire were conducted with 14 healthcare providers, who have experience in working with refugee patients. Purposive and snowball sampling method was used to recruit 14 healthcare providers. Thematic analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. Descriptive analysis was performed on the pre-interview questionnaire results. To our knowledge, there is limited research exploring historical, cultural, and healthcare utilization factors that are relevant for providing health care to refugee patients, yet the significance of it will be invaluable and beneficial to healthcare providers as more refugees call the U.S. their home. The study identified five historical, ten cultural, and eight healthcare utilization factors that can be useful for healthcare providers as a start to a framework when working with all patients, refugee or not