Mexican-Origin Mothers’ Experiences Using Children’s Health Care Services

Abstract

A focused ethnographic study in an urban Latino community in the western United States describes Mexican-origin mothers 'experiences obtaining and using health services for their children. Repeated interviews with mothers, participant observation, and children's medical records composed the data sources. Qualitative findings suggest access to health care begins in the household, where women negotiate a working diagnosis for the children's illness with family members and coalesce support for health care seeking. Immigrant mothers described more barriers to children's health care than more acculturated mothers. Quantitative analyses of medical records supported this finding, with children of the least acculturated mothers demonstrating fewer well-child visits, increased emergent visits, and lower levels of immunization completeness. The results suggest health care providers can better meet the needs of Latino families with children by offering better explanations about children's diagnoses and treatment plans and demonstrating personalismo, or a friendly, kind, and social approach to care.

Effects of physical therapy delivery via home video telerehabilitation on functional and health-related quality of life outcomes

“…Patient satisfaction is an important measure for ensuring the quality of telerehabilitation care. Measures of satisfaction may also relate to levels of patient motivation and compliance with prescribed treatment regimens [17].…”

“…Veteran access to healthcare services is a topic of high interest and concern to both providers and researchers [6,[17][18][19][20]. Numerous factors may interfere with patient access to healthcare, including distance, high travelrelated expenses, reduced numbers of healthcare providers within rural areas, transportation barriers, caregiver burden, attitude toward and perception of medical care providers, consumer knowledge, informal caregiver and/ or familial supports, and ethnic and cultural differences.…”

Mexican Immigrant Mothers' Expectations for Children's Health Services

“…Spanish-language health care services have long been defined as a civil right for limited English proficient (LEP) patients. Another expectation is of personalismo in encounters (Caudle, 1993;Clark, 2002;Gonzalez, 2004;Marín, 1989;McKenna, 1989). In satisfying the Mexican cultural expectation for a more personal, warm, and social interaction in children's health care delivery, providers will learn in informal preliminary discussions more about parents' expectations for children's health care.…”

ACCULTURATION AND LATINO HEALTH IN THE UNITED STATES: A Review of the Literature and its Sociopolitical Context

“…Chesney (24), while controlling for social class and social isolation, found in a largely Mexican American population living near the Texas-Mexico border that their predisposition to use of health care services was directly related to acculturation: The highly acculturated had twice the rates of utilization of the less acculturated. In an ethnographic study of Latina women in the Rocky Mountain West, Clark (26) found that immigrant or less acculturated Latina mothers described more barriers to care than did more acculturated mothers.…”