Irregular immigrants will go to health centres, but without health card

Immigrants who are in Spain illegally once again have the right to access to primary care in the Spanish National Health System (NHS) but will not recover the card that was removed with the approval of the reform in 2012. This was announced this Tuesday in an interview with Efe the Spanish Health Minister, Alfonso Alonso, which defends this decision by "public health issues" because it is "more practical" and "not saturate emergencies”.

Hospital La Fe develops a pioneering program to prevent alcohol and tobacco

Professionals of Health Department in Hospital La Fe in Valencia warn of high rates of illness from tobacco consumption and promoted in response, for 10 years, programs with a comprehensive approach to smoking from schools, and two years ago they expanded the program to alcohol consume.

When your life depends on where you live

In Spain, an undetermined number of tens of thousands of people have been excluded from any health care that is not considered an emergency.

In the 50 gigabytes of information that the Government has made available to the public on its new transparency portal there is a fact that cannot be found: how much the government of Spain saves restricting access of irregular migrants to health care. The absence is striking, considering that it was precisely these savings which justified the breaking of the universality of the right to health care in Spain.

More than 1,000 Immigrants report medical neglect in two years

In the past two years, the Valencian Observatory of the Universal Right to Health (Odusalud) has detected 1,004 cases of public health neglect to immigrants in Valencia. In more than half of the cases, patients were not received by a doctor and although the legislation maintains the right to a free medical care for all children, 94 of them had problems to be addressed, as denounced the entity. The average of monthly incidences has continued to grow in a context in which from the Ministry of Health prefers not to evaluate the data because, as the entity say, the health care system “does not deny assistance to any citizen."

HIV specialists criticize health exclusion of undocumented

According to a survey of the Group for the Study of Aids (GESIDA) of the Spanish Company for Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology (SEIMC), the 37% of infectious disease specialists in HIV state that the Royal Decree of 2012 which left no standard health care to illegal immigrants made difficult their work. In the study participated 97 professionals from 16 autonomous communities (all the Spanish autonomous communities except Murcia).

Lowest specialised care and increased use of emergency services among the immigrant population in Spain.

A study carried out by the Biomedical Research Centre Network reveals health differences between immigrant and native population in Spain. This is a review of scientific papers held by their Sub programme in Immigration and Health, on health, epidemiology and health services use by the immigrant population in Spain.

“Intervention Research on Health Literacy among ageing population” (IROHLA)

This project is focused on improving health literacy for older people in Europe. It aims to take stock of on-going health literacy programmes and projects. It makes use of knowledge and experience of programmes in other sectors (e.g. private and social sectors) to be applied to the health sector.

MEET project 2^nd Newsletter

The second issue of the MEET (Meeting the health literacy needs of immigrant populations) newsletter has been released. In this edition, you will find information about the project, updates about the main outcomes from the project activities, interesting links and upcoming work - shops and initiatives.

Follow the links below to view the newsletter in English and Greek.

MEET Newsletter (English)
Δελτίο Τύπου ΜEET (Ελληνικά)