Creating a safe healthcare space for immigrants who have many issues going on in their lives all at once, invites attention to many factors. Like any good science, it starts with honest inquiry and good tools–clinical tools. Morten describes how these came together to support the co-creation of services at an immigrant clinic in Odense, Denmark.
Guests
Morten Sodemann
University Professor of Global and Migrant Health, University of Southern Denmark. Senior Consultant, The Migrant Health Clinic, Odense University Hospital.
More about Morten
A teacher, researcher, debater, and presenter, Morten is employed as the chief physician and clinical professor at the immigrant medicine clinic, which he helped develop in 2008. He received the 2021 Danish Public Health Award for his work with vulnerable people.
Morten and his colleagues have recognized several themes in the healthcare services they co-create: 1) doing what makes sense to the patient-person and professional-person; 2) sorting the often-present chaos; 3) when everything seems to fail, listen even more carefully to the patient-person; 4) in continuity, be willing to become part of the patient-person’s story.
As Morten writes, “We love to blame the strangers, the poor, and the short educated for epidemics. But that is neither fair nor correct. It is not the culture of minorities that is the problem. It is the majority’s cultural acceptance of inequality in health as an expression of a weak character that is the problem.”
Morten describes how he works with immigrant-persons to co-create healthcare services.
Supplementary materials
Readings
Sodeman M. (2022) What you don’t know will hurt the patient: Cross-cultural clinical medicine and communication with ethnic minority patients. First published in Danish in 2020, now available in English. A free pdf of the book may be found at http://www.ouh.dk/textbook
This book conveys the overall message that “much becomes understandable when you understand the patient’s life story – whether he or she was born in Sweden or Somalia. Because most of the body, we have in common, and most diseases we have in common…it is the life story, social events, resources, trauma, actions, the help you receive and the social consequences that determine whether we get sick, how we get sick, how we live with illness, and how long we live with it. The book provides a number of examples of how to co-create sustainable solutions with patients, no matter how complex their health problems are.”
AM, Christensen JB, Kamionka SL, Eriksen ML, Sodemann M. “Hospital-Based Case Management for Migrant Patients: A Systematic Review.”2016; Pub H Panorama 2(4): 401-588.
Radl-Karimi, C., Nielsen, D. S., Sodemann, M., Batalden, P., & von Plessen, C. (2021). “When I feel safe, I dare to open up”: immigrant and refugee patients’ experiences with coproducing healthcare, Patient Education and Counseling, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2021.11.009i