What Social Work Educators and Practitioners Need to Know on Immigrants’ Health Care: a Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: 47 million immigrants are living in the United States and they constitute 14.4 percent of the total population in the United States. As the immigrant population grows rapidly, their health care needs require ongoing and additional attention from social workers and health care practitioners. Methods:This study systematically reviewed content on immigrants and healthcare in social work literature and discussed implications for social services for immigrant populations. Systematic review and content analysis were employed. Research methods, topics, and samples of included studies were screened and coded.Results: 47 studies met eligibility for inclusion in this review. The majority of included studies were cross-sectional analysis (60%), focusing on mental health care issues (51%), health care utilization (51%) and adult immigrant samples (49%).Discussion: Encouraging diversity of social work research can directly promote social work services and health care practices for the underrepresented populations. Our findings suggest that more input from the social work profession on evidence-based practice for diverse immigrants are required. Social workers and health care practitioners must continually be reminded of the health care needs of immigrants. MethodsAdherence to the PRISMA guideline, we systematically reviewed social work literature, and an analytical approach to address our research question. Content analysis is a systematic approach used to identify and analyze content in the literature which relates to a specific topic. Summative content analysis (SCA) is an effective method that analyzes specific content in particular journals and attempts to explore the usage of certain content [11]. SCA starts with identifying and counting the frequency of specific content in text data with specific research purposes and then interprets the content [12].As for the present study, four steps were taken to search and analyze the content of physical health care issues, mental health care issues, and health care utilization among immigrants. They included: 1) social work journal selection, 2) article searching, 3) article