There is robust evidence that homelessness and the associated life conditions of a homeless person may cause and exacerbate a wide range of health problems, while healthcare for the homeless is simultaneously limited in accessibility, availability, and appropriateness. This article investigates legal frameworks of health care provision, existing knowledge on numbers of homeless to be considered, and current means of health care provision for four EU countries with different economic and public health background: Austria, Greece, Poland, and Romania. National experts investigated the respective regulations and practices in place with desk research. The results show differences in national frameworks of inclusion into health care provision and knowledge on the number of people experiencing homelessness, but high similarity when it comes to main actors of actual health care provision for homeless populations. In all included countries, despite their differences in economic investments and universality of access to public health systems, it is mainly NGOs providing health care to those experiencing homelessness. This phenomenon fits into conceptual frameworks developed around service provision for vulnerable population groups, wherein it has been described as “structural compensation,” meaning that NGOs compensate a structural inappropriateness that can be observed within public health systems.
Intergenerational Family Solidarity (IGFS) is important for social cohesion and challenged by migration. Scientific evidence on how migrants sustain IGFS is scarce. In 2016, 421,875 migrants from different Former Yugoslav Republics were residing in Austria, the majority coming from Bosnia and Herzegovina (162.021) and Serbia (137.057). Immigrants from these countries are predominantly economic migrants who came in the 1960s and refugees of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. A literature review showed that intergenerational solidarity in migrant families in Austria is hardly covered by previous research. No published studies explicitly dealing with this subject were found. To generate more understanding, three migrant women who migrated as refugees in the 1990s from Bosnia and Serbia were asked about their family structures, family life, and family solidarity through semi-structured in-depth interviews based on qualitative sociological method. Results show that although immigration has weakened IGFS in terms of frequency of contact, high normative solidarity prevails and results in feelings of guilt and non-met family responsibilities. Support of parents and relatives is sustained by sending money and goods to the home country.
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