A Lancaster University and University of Glasgow project which brings together experts in health and migration, non-governmental organisations, the NHS and health professionals across Europe will feature a poetry performance premiere at its final workshop.
Doctors within Borders is a Wellcome Trust-funded networking initiative on mobile populations in contemporary health systems run by Karolina Follis and Luca Follis at Lancaster University and Nicola Burns at the University of Glasgow.
The workshop, on September 23 and 24, will feature a specially commissioned poem from educator, poet and writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, from Leeds.
Members of the network explore the dynamic and novel ways health professionals have engaged with the mobility of their patients, frequently working outside the regular health system.
The project held its first workshop in January 2020 when they asked how refugees, people with an unsettled immigration status and people without a fixed address, access healthcare in a bid to understand the challenges and find out how practitioners deliver care to those groups.
Covid-19 magnified health inequalities and exposed the marginal and unsafe nature of the lives of many social groups. In nationally configured healthcare systems people whose legal and residential status is unsettled are among those particularly disadvantaged.
The second workshop in June 2021 explored the challenges of research on healthcare for migrants, refugees and other mobile groups in the pandemic and post-pandemic context.
Dr Luca Follis says: "Consolidating key insights from the first and second Doctors within Borders workshops, the final workshop focuses on the role that research can play in disrupting a return to the kind of 'normal' where refugees, migrants and members of other mobile groups continue to be denied rights to healthcare and where bordering practices continue to play out within healthcare settings."
For the full programme and more details about the workshop please visit the website.
The September 23 keynote Lecture is open to the public and will be delivered by Professor Kate O'Donnell - A safe space: Supporting mobile and marginalised populations within Primary Care.
