Health of migrants – a life course perspective

Date:

13 March 2025, Thursday

Time:

10.30 am-11.30am [Singapore [GMT +8]

Location:

Seminar Room 2, Level 8
Tahir Foundation Building (MD1)
National University of Singapore
12 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117549

Abstract:

Immigrants experience health risks and develop health needs that may differ from the risks and needs of the majority population in a receiving country. Additionally, immigrants may face specific barriers to accessing health care. These barriers apply both to ‘regular’ migrants seeking work and economic opportunities and to those seeking protection and asylum. I will show how a life course perspective can help to better understand the resulting health-related diversity, or heterogeneity, of today’s societies. Using the example of migrants and refugees in Germany, I will illustrate how health services address this heterogeneity, with a particular emphasis on entitlement restrictions and access barriers to health care.

Based on the insights from the life course approach and on empirical data, I will demonstrate that public health research and practice are not ‘neutral’. In other words, public health is not free of underlying normative agendas (‘mind frames’ that define what ought to be). I will discuss such normative agendas that may constrain public health research work or practice in immigrant health and that researchers and practitioners are often not aware of. A life course approach can help to expose such hidden normative agendas in immigrant health, e.g. by demonstrating the need to consider health needs arising beyond national borders.

Speaker:

Prof Dr Oliver Razum
Professor, School of Public Health Bielefeld University, Germany

Oliver Razum, M.D., MSc Epidemiology, is full professor and head of the Department of Epidemiology & International Public Health, School of Public Health, Bielefeld University, Germany (since 2004). He was Dean of the School of Public Health 2012-2022.

Oliver has been working in social epidemiology, in particular on the health of immigrants and refugees/asylum seekers, for 30 years. He is member of the Executive Board of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER), and also of various advisory boards of the German National Institute of Public Health (Robert Koch-Institut).