Access to health care by international female migrants and female refugees in the city of São Paulo during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The present study is a narrative literature review aimed at understanding the specificities of access to healthcare for international migrants and refugees, with a focus on migrant women, and reflecting on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on this population. Articles were searched in databases in the Virtual Health Library, refining by sources from the Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), MEDLINE, PubMed Central (PMC), and the Scientific Electronic Library (Scielo). From the articles found, after reading the abstracts, 35 met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed according to the principles of thematic analysis. The literature shows that access to healthcare for international migrants and refugees has specificities that can contribute to a situation of health vulnerability, potentially exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to social inequalities, sociocultural differences, the burden of domestic work, and different forms of violence accentuated during the pandemic, migrant women constitute a severely affected group by the setbacks of the socio-sanitary crisis caused by Covid-19. The scarcity of focused public policies makes it difficult to confront this challenge, which, to be solved, must take into account the socio-economic, cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers existing between them and the service, as well as the central role they play in family care, acting as a bridge between the migrant community and the healthcare system