Providing for the Sexual Health Needs of Canadian Immigrants

Abstract

Background: Sexual health is increasingly understood as an integral part of health. In Canada, education for sexual health is delivered predominantly in middle and secondary school. What of adults who immigrate to Canada from countries where sex education is not delivered to youth? This paper explores the needs and experiences of one such group of Canadian immigrants: those from Iran.Method: Ten married male and 10 married female immigrants from Iran living in a midsized Canadian city were recruited using snowball sampling and participated in qualitative interviews. The sample varied in age, education level, duration of marriage, and stay in Canada.Results: Participants addressed three themes: experiences accessing information and health services, necessary content of information, and preferred ways of providing sexual health information and services. Key barriers to accessing and using sexual health services, experienced by all interviewees, regardless of the length of time they were in Canada, included language, cultural misunderstandings, embarrassment, long waits, and limited time that physicians spent with patients. Examples were provided of misunderstandings and inappropriate or even offensive questions or suggestions made by health practitioners who were unfamiliar with patients' cultural norms related to sexuality. Participants believed their needs and questions were different from their Canadian counterparts and wanted a confidential, linguistically and culturally friendly source of information such as a website in the Farsi language.Conclusions: More attention needs to be paid to developing public health and medical services related to sexual health that take account of the cultural diversities represented in the Canadian population.

Access to Primary and Preventive Care among Foreign‐Born Adults in Canada and the United States

“…In Canada, Asian immigrants have significantly lower rates than Canadian‐born women and other immigrant groups, even after many years of residence (McDonald and Kennedy 2007). These demographic differences may be associated with more barriers among Asian immigrants to Canada due to lack of knowledge of health‐related issues and the health care system, cultural attitudes and beliefs, gender roles, or lack of culturally appropriate services (Lai and Chau 2007; Maticka‐Tyndale, Shirpak, and Chinichian 2007; Wang 2007; Brotto et al 2008; Roth and Kobayashi 2008; Wang, Rosenberg, and Lo 2008). Given that the survey was not conducted in Asian languages, immigrants from Asian countries (especially newer immigrants with limited English proficiency) may have been underrepresented in the JCUSH data; thus, the low Pap test rates in Canada may in fact overestimate the true rates, which may be even lower.…”

Factors influencing sexual and reproductive health of Muslim women: a systematic review

“…The results of 59 published papers were synthesised. Thirty-eight studies were cross-sectional surveys , nineteen were qualitative studies [72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90], and two employed mixed methods design [91,92]. Table 1 shows The majority of studies were conducted in Iran and Turkey, which are the fastest growing medical research output in the Middle East [93].…”

“…Insufficient knowledge about contraception and lack of basic reproductive knowledge was reported as one of the main barriers to contraception use among Muslim women [20,26,29,31,39,41,46,83,90,91]. Some women are unaware of services available for them [69,74,75,78,87], particularly unmarried women [74,75,78].…”

Indian‐born patients attending a sexual health clinic in Australia have differing characteristics to their Australian‐born counterparts

“…Migrants and people belonging to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) background groups are often at risk of poor health outcomes, especially in relation to sexual health . For example in the UK, people from the Indian subcontinent were significantly different from people of English origin in terms of their sexual behaviour and contraceptive use …”

“…These observations may also apply to other CALD communities in Australia and other countries with large migrant communities. For example, with regards to sexual health, a study conducted in adult Iranian migrants in Canada concluded that more attention needed to be paid to developing public health and medical services related to sexual health that took account of the cultural diversities in the population . CALD communities could thus potentially benefit from evidenced‐based, culturally and linguistically appropriate interventions and targeted health promotion.…”