Abstract

Building upon a model for primary health care services for refugee and immigrant communities, this study advances a specific framework for understanding three types of ancillary services: language assistance, systems navigation support, and hands-on support, provided by refugee- and immigrant-run community-based organizations (RI-CBOs). This place-based study allows examining organizational activities in a specific locality where context and structural factors (e.g., the density of health agencies and resources) are relatively similar across participating organizations, focusing on a Midwestern mid-sized U.S. city. Drawing on surveys and interviews with 16 RI-CBOs about healthcare- related activities, analysis entailed summary statistics and thematic analyses to build a synthesizing conceptual framework that incorporates existing literature on refugee/immigrant health with empirical findings. Our findings indicate that RI-CBOs are in a unique position to effectively liaise between the client and health care professional and to improve health education literacy.

Keywords: Health education; Ancillary health services; Refugee