BackgroundBased on an analysis of published literature, this paper provides an over-view of the challenges associated with delivering on the right to access quality health care for international migrants to industrialized countries, and asks which group of professionals is best equipped to provide services that increase health and legal literacy. Both rights and challenges are approached from a social justice perspective with the aim of identifying opportunities to promote greater health equity. That is, to go beyond the legal dictates enshrined in principles of equality, and target as an ethical imperative a situation where all migrants receive the particular assistance they need to overcome the barriers that inhibit their equitable access to health care. This assistance is especially important for migrant groups that are further disadvantaged by differing cultural constructions of gender. Viewing the topic from this perspective makes evident a gap in both research literature and policy. The review has found that while health literacy is debated and enshrined as a policy objective, and consideration is given to improving legal literacy as a means of challenging social injustice in developing nations, however, no discussion has been identified that considers assisting migrants to gain legal literacy as a step toward achieving not only health literacy and improved health outcomes, but critical participation as members of their adoptive society.ConclusionIncreasing migrant health literacy, amalgamated with legal literacy, aids migrants to better access their human right to appropriate care, which in turn demonstrably assists in increasing social engagement, citizenship and productivity. However what is not evident in the literature, is which bureaucratic or societal group holds responsibility for assisting migrants to develop critical citizenship literacy skills. This paper proposes that a debate is required to determine both who is best placed to provide services that increase health and legal literacy, and how they should be resourced, trained and equipped.

Despite broadening consideration of sex- and gender-based issues in health research, when seeking information on how sex and gender contribute to disease contexts for specific health or public health topics, a lack of consistent or systematic use of terminology in health literature means that it remains difficult to identify research with a sex or gender focus. These inconsistencies are driven, in part, by the complexity and terminological inflexibility of the indexing systems for gender- and sex-related terms in public health databases. Compounding the issue are authors’ diverse vocabularies, and in some cases lack of accuracy in defining and using fundamental sex–gender terms in writing, and when establishing keyword lists and search criteria. Considering the specific case of the tuberculosis (TB) prevention and management literature, an analysis of sex and gender sensitivity in three health databases was performed. While there is an expanding literature exploring the roles of both sex and gender in the trajectory and lived experience of TB, we demonstrate the potential to miss relevant research when attempting to retrieve literature using only the search criteria currently available. We, therefore, argue that for good clinical practice to be achieved; there is a need for both public health researchers and users to be better educated in appropriate usage of the terminology associated with sex and gender. In addition, public health database indexers ought to accept the task of developing and implementing adequate definitions of sex and gender terms so as to facilitate access to sex- and gender-related research. These twin advances will allow clinicians to more readily recognize and access knowledge pertaining to systems of redress that respond to gendered risks that compound existing health inequalities in disease management and control, particularly when dealing with already complex diseases. Given the methodological and linguistic challenges presented by the multidimensional and highly contextual nature of definitions of sex and gender, it will be important that this review task be undertaken using a multidisciplinary approach.

Current knowledge• For people living with HIV infection in India, stigma is a pervasive reality and the greatest barrier to accessing treatment, quality of life and survival.• However, women and men experience stigma differently. Despite typically contracting the disease through marital sexual relations, married monogamous women are also subject to stigma resulting from moral blame.• Stigma affects women both in public spheres of social relationships and in private through psychological stresses. These spheres are typically considered in isolation not as interrelating. Novel information• In order to go beyond consideration of discrete public and private arenas of stigma, this paper applies Engel's biopsychosocial model on chronic disease experience as promoting an understanding of the effects of illness on women across their biomedical, social and psychological life arenas. Use of Engel's approach resists binary separation of private and public experiences of HIV related stigma and encourages care responses to address a whole-of-life continuum.• By gaining information from particular groups of HIV-positive women about the whole-of-life situations where they experience stigma related constraint, inter-relationships between stigma sites can be mapped and specific root causes of marginalisation identified.• In the complex context of establishing programs of care for women living with HIV, arranging qualitative information on lived experiences in such a way as to identify interacting barriers to care, can assist in tailoring multifaceted HIV-care programs that address the particular needs of specific groups of women. Such customised programs would embody dual objectives: 1) to respond to the women's own identified and prioritised needs across biomedical, social and psychological arenas in a coordinated manner, and 2) to work to reduce stigma as a barrier to care. ABSTRACTFor women living with HIV infection in India, stigma is a pervasive reality and the greatest barrier to accessing treatment, quality of life and survival. Defining stigma according to Goffman as a socially conceived abnormality, this paper then draws on Engel's biopsychosocial model for chronic disease to show the pervasive nature of stigma as a continuum affecting all dimensions of life for married, monogamous Indian women with positive HIV sero-status. Two distinct perspectives were identified in the literature: 1) Public: social and relational stigma, or 2) Private: internalised psychological stigma. Only four of the twenty published works reviewed noted interrelationships between these public and private spheres. Only one of those employed an ethnographic methodology to understand stigma from the perspective of the women themselves.While concepts associated with stigma among women living with HIV are diversely employed in research, by considering them as a whole through an intersectional biopsychosocial lens, this paper attempts to provide a basis for implementing integrated and tailored responses. Once the manifestations and interconnected caus...