MigRefHealth: Co-creating asset and place-based approaches to tackling refugee and migrant health exclusion

Project Overview

MigRefHealth explores how community assets — services, activities, spaces, and organisations that are integral to community life — are used by refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in their daily lives. The project takes a co-creative, place-based approach to understanding health inequality, working to make sure that services used by local communities are collaboratively identified and better supported to improve health outcomes for refugee, asylum-seeking, and migrant communities. The project focuses on three regions — North London, South London, and the East of England — to understand the different challenges and opportunities that urban and rural areas provide.

Objectives

The project aims to identify and evaluate how social determinants of health impact outcomes for diverse refugee, asylum-seeking, and migrant communities; to develop a model supporting Integrated Care Systems, civil society agencies, and research communities to collaborate on co-created initiatives; to research the scope for community assets to support health and wellbeing; to co-design models for place-based integrated systems that tackle the wider social determinants of health; and to build opportunities for wider community impact through sharing knowledge so that it can be used in other communities and regions.

Key Activities to Date

The project works in partnership with community organisations and groups to co-identify community assets — including food banks, green and blue spaces, advice centres, and community hubs — and map the ways in which they are used by refugee, asylum-seeking, and migrant communities to support their health and wellbeing. Community asset maps and output reports are available via the project website.

The team has also been active in disseminating findings across academic and policy audiences, with presentations at the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East of England, the Queen's Institute of Community Nursing Annual Conference, the UK Participatory Research Network, and the IMISCOE network, among others. A peer-reviewed article on the challenges of research co-production in multilingual spaces has been published in the journal Social Inclusion.

Collaborators

MigRefHealth is a collaboration between Anglia Ruskin University, Middlesex University, and the University of Greenwich, working with a project team of partners including the East of England Local Government Association Strategic Migration Partnership, Great Yarmouth Refugee Outreach and Support, Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign, the Queen's Nursing Institute, Migration Works CIC, Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network, and Barnet Citizens

More Information

For community asset maps, output reports, project news, and upcoming events, visit the MigRefHealth project website at www.migrefhealth.co.uk