MIGHTY - MIGrants' HealTh and healthcare access in ItalY

A PRIN project studying migrants' health, unmet needs, and access to healthcare services in Italy using administrative data and ad hoc surveys.

One of the goals of the Agenda for Sustainable Development is good health and well-being, which aims at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all citizens at all ages. Despite the aspiration to guarantee equal access to healthcare, in Europe, there are persistent inequalities between migrants and natives in access to healthcare services.

Although today more than five million foreigners live in Italy, compared to the international literature, evidence on migrants’ health and the effect of migration on health and healthcare use is limited for the country.

The Problem

One of the reasons for the lack of studies is the data availability and fragmentation. Healthcare databases have several limits because some relevant information about behaviours (such as smoking habits and drinking) and private for-pay health services utilisation are missing. Available survey data on migrants’ health and access to healthcare uncover irregular migrants, underestimate recent migrants, and collect data only with reference to the time of the survey. Moreover, the fragmentation of the available results prevents access to synthetic information for policymakers to promote targeted policies; clear indications are missing to help those who assist migrants in addressing migrants’ needs.

Objectives

Our project aims at filling this gap by producing new and updated knowledge on migrants’ health, unmet needs, and access to healthcare services by providing policymakers and those who assist migrants with a comprehensive tool (dashboard) that allows consulting data on migrants’ health, unmet needs, and access to healthcare services and visualising a set of potentially critical indicators in supporting decisions and policies in the Lombardy and Marche regions.

Methodology

The project will:

  1. Analyse the regional healthcare databases to quantify and evaluate the use of health services in the migrant population and to estimate the health condition of migrants in real-world.
  2. Compare Italians’ and migrants’ health through the Regional Health System, focusing on birth outcomes and selected chronic and acute diseases.
  3. Collect new data on migrants’ health, needs and access to healthcare services — including irregular migrants — through an ad hoc survey, to complement the limitations of secondary data.
  4. Combine administrative and survey data to build synthetic indicators available to policymakers through a dedicated dashboard.

Once experimented, this approach will constitute a prototype to be applied in other Italian regions. The project will also provide innovative methodological results: the use of two sources of data will allow for evaluating the undercoverage and the bias when using only a unique source.