In this formative research project, we seek to better understand the general barriers to refugee access to higher education. Using mixed methods research--which included surveys, interviews, and course data--we evaluate the benefits and challenges experienced by refugee students in Israel who are enrolled in Arizona State University's Education for Humanity programs. In the end, this case study resulted in 24 recommend programmatic changes designed to eliminate the barriers that prevent refugee students from accessing and succeeding in higher education.

In this formative research project, we seek to better understand the general barriers to refugee access to higher education. Using mixed methods research--which included surveys, interviews, and course data--we evaluate the benefits and challenges experienced by refugee students in Israel who are enrolled in Arizona State University's Education for Humanity programs. In the end, this case study resulted in 24 recommend programmatic changes designed to eliminate the barriers that prevent refugee students from accessing and succeeding in higher education.

Salud Empoderada is a bilingual English-Spanish blog with the goals of providing pre-medical advice, exposure to careers in medicine through interviews with leaders in medicine and science, and resources to support and encourage Latino pre-medical college students at Arizona State University. This information is provided in the forms of blog posts and infographics. Salud Empoderada was created as a way to address the lack of representation of Latino medical students enrolled in U.S. medical schools and Latino physicians in the U.S. Therefore, Salud Empoderada targets Latino students in the first stage of their journeys to becoming a doctor, pre-medical students, to help inspire and guide them to pursue their dreams despite the challenges they may face, including struggles with mental health, socioeconomic status, access to Latino mentors in medicine and science, health disparities, gender, DACA status, attacks on affirmative action, and the MCAT exam. Furthermore, Salud Empoderada encompasses my trip with Barrett, The Honors College to Costa Rica to share insight on life in Costa Rica and the Indigenous tribes residing there. Sharing this experience with Latino pre-medical students may provide them further exposure to other cultures, the heterogeneity within Latin America, the importance of cultural competence in medicine and the possibilities that global health and Spanish studies offer to become well-rounded and holistic future physicians.

The term “Iraqi American” defines any person of Iraqi origin who is residing in the United States. From 1960 until 2014, Iraq experienced numerous armed conflicts and international sanctions. As a result, a great surge of Iraqis migrated out of the country to seek refuge elsewhere. The United States alone currently houses about 400,000+ persons of Iraqi descent, many of whom identify as its citizens. Despite that, Iraqi Americans remain severely understudied. Therefore, this study aims to understand the cultural barriers Iraqi American women face while seeking healthcare in the United States, and how these barriers can impact their behaviors. I collected data via semi-structured interviews with eight Iraqi American women. In this study, I identified five major themes that contributed to women’s healthcare seeking behaviors: societal/familial pressures, staying “pure,” shame associated with performing medical procedures, taboo surrounding discussions of female health conditions, and issues regarding being in the presence of male doctors. Many of these themes involved cultural stigmas and pointed to potential pathways to destigmatize women’s healthcare in the community. This study acts as an initiative to understanding Iraqi Americans better and lays groundwork for further research.

Refugee women face many challenges to obtaining maternal, reproductive, and sexual health post-resettlement including the language barrier, navigating the healthcare system, finding childcare to attend appointments, and cultural mismatches between their beliefs and practices around the prenatal, childbirth, and postpartum periods and that of the healthcare system in which they resettle into. This cultural barrier poses a challenge to healthcare providers as well as it necessitates that they respect their patients’ cultural beliefs while still providing them with the highest standard of care. Cultural competency training has been used to assist providers in understanding and responding to cultural differences, but gaps still exist when it comes to navigating specific scenarios. The objective of this research was to conduct a literature review of studies pertaining to refugee maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare post-resettlement to investigate the following questions: how tensions between biomedically accepted best practices and cultural norms present themselves in these healthcare fields, how healthcare providers take into consideration their patients’ cultural beliefs and norms when providing maternal, reproductive, and sexual healthcare to refugee women, and what can be done to continue to improve the provision of culturally appropriate care to refugee women. Findings from twenty different studies that focused primarily on eight cultural groups identified that Cesarean sections, inductions, and certain family planning methods are significant points of contention regarding cultural norms for refugee women and that they prefer certain foods, birthing positions, and other cultural practices during the delivery. Healthcare providers consider their refugee patients’ cultural beliefs by creating relationships with them built on trust, utilizing community liaisons, and through attempts to accommodate cultural practices when possible. Some potential improvements offered to improve cultural competency were improved cultural competency training that focused on how healthcare providers ask questions and interact with their patients, increased partnership with refugee communities, and an emphasis on patient education surrounding interventions and procedures related to maternal and reproductive health that could cause hesitations. The results of this literature review accentuated the importance of relationships within the field of refugee women’s healthcare, between both refugee patients and their providers and refugee communities and the healthcare systems. Providing refugee women access to more culturally competent healthcare can increase their trust in the healthcare systems of the countries they resettle in and healthcare utilization that can contribute to improved health outcomes for refugee women and their children.