Migrant healthcare workers during COVID-19: bringing an intersectional health system-related approach into pandemic protection. A German case study

Abstract

Introduction. Migrant healthcare workers played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, but data are lacking especially for high-resourced European healthcare systems. This study aims to research migrant healthcare workers through an intersectional health system-related approach, using Germany as a case study. Methods. An intersectional research framework was created and a rapid scoping study performed. Secondary analysis of selected items taken from two COVID-19 surveys was undertaken to compare perceptions of national and foreign-born healthcare workers, using descriptive statistics. Results. Available research is focused on worst-case pandemic scenarios of Brazil and the United Kingdom, highlighting racialised discrimination and higher risks of migrant healthcare workers. The German data did not reveal significant differences between national-born and foreign-born healthcare workers for items related to health status including SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination, and perception of infection risk, protective workplace measures, and government measures, but items related to social participation and work conditions with higher infection risk indicate a higher burden of migrant healthcare workers. Conclusions. COVID-19 pandemic policy must include migrant healthcare workers, but simply adding the migration status is not enough. We introduce an intersectional health systems-related approach to understand how pandemic policies create social inequalities and how the protection of migrant healthcare workers may be improved.

Migrant healthcare workers’ experiences and mobility patterns in a global health crisis: a qualitative study with Romania physicians working in Germany

“…We applied an explorative qualitative approach based on semi-structured interviews and informed by an intersectional research framework that places individual migrant HCWs in the context of health systems, organisations, and professions (40). We set the focus on EU mobility and actor-centred perceptions of the COVID-19 situation.…”