Health and wellbeing

Health and Social Care Advocacy

Health and Social Care Advocacy is a project commissioned by Lancashire Refugee Integration Team for people who are refugees living in Lancashire and Blackpool and people who are seeking asylum in those areas.

Refugees tell us that they often experience barriers in accessing health and care services. This includes a lack of accessibility, access to quality interpretation and understanding of the services available.

Through this project our advocates are supporting people to understand their rights and access services. You can make a referral for any resettler in Lancashire by visiting thee Health and Social Care Advocacy website.

Safe surgeries

A safe surgery can be any GP practice which commits to taking steps to tackle the barriers faced by many migrants in accessing healthcare. If you would like to know more about becoming a Safe Surgery, please visit the Safe Surgeries - Doctors of the World Website.

Resources

There are hundreds of valuable resources available online to enable professionals to effectively support resettlers with health matters. We have compiled just a few below.

General

The British Medical Association provide a refugee and asylum seeker health toolkit. It gives guidance on the key legal, ethical and practical considerations you need to take into account when treating a patient who is a refugee or asylum seeker, and signposts to other sources of support and information.

Doctors of the World is an independent humanitarian movement working at home and abroad to empower excluded people to access healthcare. Their website provides access to translated health information on a variety of issues, including Covid and Flu vaccines. 

The Refugee Council provides lots of useful resources, including translated guides on how to access GP provision.

The UK Government provides a NHS entitlements: migrant health guide for healthcare practitioners on the health needs of migrant patients.

UNHCR produces Public Health resources for displaced people.

Refugee and migrant health toolkit

The World Health Organization have developed a Refugee and migrant health toolkit, a web-based one-stop comprehensive platform of tools and resources, to support the global, regional, and country efforts in implementing health and migration-related activities.