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The pattern of contact with general practice and casualty departments of immigrants and non-immigrants in Copenhagen, Denmark

Lise Dyhr, John Sahl Andersen, MD, Gerda Engholm, MSc

1. aug. 2007
15 min.

Faktaboks

Fakta

Material and methods

The material includes all contacts with general practice and casualty departments during 1 January to 31 December 1998 made by 423,201 people with a permanent address in Copenhagen throughout the year. Immigrants were defined as persons with longer than three months' residence permit and foreign citizenship. This study focuses on immigrants with origin in one of nine countries which in Denmark are predominantly representative of two types of immigration: 1) Refugees and their offspring, 2) job-seekers who arrived in the late 1960s and their offspring. The category "immigrants, other" representing persons from a variety of about 90 foreign countries, was excluded ( Table 1 ).

Refugees are given residence permit according to a need for asylum. Their social background will vary according to their country of origin, level of education etc. The residence permit for the groups of job-seekers in the late 1960s was determined by a lack of manpower in Denmark and social deprivation in the country of origin. Many of the job-seekers were farmers with a relatively low education, if any at all. The two categories in our study: refugees and job-seekers, included their spouses coming from the country of origin in the residence permit according to the rules of "family reunification", and their children below 40 years. Table 2 presents the included number of persons by age group and country of origin.

A total of 2,041,454 daytime services provided by general practice (60.2% consultations in clinic, 1.9% home visits and 38.0% telephone consultations) and 202,179 out-of-hours services (21.3% consultations in clinic, 30.3% home visits and 48.4% telephone consultations) registered in the Health Insurance Register were linked with information about citizenship and place of birth obtained from the Statistical Office in Copenhagen. The 112,733 attendances at hospital casualty departments were processed in the same way. The results present contacts in the out-of-hours services and casualty departments collectively.

The data were analyzed using the Poisson regression model and contact rates were described by the multiplicative models using the factors age and country of origin. We made separate analysis for each gender according to life phase: childhood and youth (1-18 years), adulthood (19-59 years). Elderly persons (≥60 years) were only described not analysed because of a risk of age confounding. The life phases were divided into shorter age spans and each age group was defined by gender and country of origin. We assumed the number of contacts according to be Poisson distributed and used the logarithm of the number of person years as an offset (weight) variable. The estimated parameters can be interpreted as relative risks for country of origin relative to the non-immigrants.

Results

The immigrants showed the same age and sex-related variation in contact rates as non-immigrants except for older people where the curve declined for immigrants and increased for non-immigrants ( Figure 1 ). However, the level of contact rates in the two populations differed with age.

Age 1-18 years

All immigrant groups showed significantly lower total contact rates than non-immigrants for boys as well as girls ( Table 3 ). The relative risk varied between 0.78 (95% CI 0.73-0.78) (Moroccan boys) and 0.92 (95% CI 0.88-0.96) (Somali boys) relative to non-immigrant boys. In an analysis with interactions between age and country of origin (not shown in the table) small Moroccan children (1-2 years) and teenage girls had contact rates down to 0.52 (95% CI 0.46-0.59) and 0.49 (95% CI 0.43-0.49), respectively, compared with non-immigrants. With a few exceptions, both rates of daytime consultations and contacts with the acute services (out-of-hours service/casualty departments) were significantly lower for immigrants than for non-immigrants. #>PLACEHOLDER4

Age 19-59 years

As seen in Table 4 , most immigrant groups showed higher service consumption, especially persons from Palestine, Pakistan and Iran/Iraq. Palestinian men's contact rates were 50% higher than the rates for non-immigrants. The difference was most pronounced for the acute services, where immigrant groups had considerably higher rates. In a more detailed analysis not shown in the table, the relative risk (RR) for Palestinian men aged 19-29 was 2.27 (95% CI 2.07-2.72) in the acute services. Refugees from former Ex-Yugoslavia were an exception to the described pattern with lower or the same rates as non-immigrant men.

Consultation type

There were considerable differences in the type of consultations used by non-immigrants and immigrants. Telephone consultations accounted for 39% of all contacts for non-immigrants and 14-22% (p<0.001, for homogeneity) for immigrants during the daytime and for 50% of all contacts by non-immigrants and 23-36% (p<0.001, homogeneity) for immigrants during out-of-hours. The lowest rates were observed for Somalis.

Discussion

Health care research involving immigrants faces methodological problems because immigrant status is a complex epidemiological variable consisting of social, cultural and health factors [11-13] on which knowledge is scarce. The special social, cultural and morbidity patterns associated with immigrant status may be perceived as confounders. Attempts to control for these confounders to estimate the effect of a postulated core concept of "ethnicity" has been carried out with little success for different reasons. Ethnicity is a subjective defined concept (experience based) and relevant variables are not available as for instance language qualifications, level of education in the home country etc. [14]. Concerning health factors for immigrants the evidence-based knowledge in Denmark is scarce. Our aim has therefore not been to perform an analysis taking account possible confounders, but to describe the actual use of the health care system by different immigrant subpopulations defined by their country of origin as a basis for further analytical studies. Over the years a special public interest concerning conditions for refugees and early job-seekers from the 1960's from non-Western countries has been seen. In this study we therefore focus on these two types of immigrants. It is meaningful in a Danish context because the immigration from the included countries is known to be dominated by either refugees or job-seekers. Persons in these two categories often get married with a person from their country of origin. We also classify the "family reunificated" persons as refugees and job-seekers as they are influenced by the same structural/social and traditions/cultural factors as their spouses.

Contacts as registered in the Health Insurance Register are shown to give reliable data useful for research purposes [15]. The large number of observations implies good statistical strength as seen by the narrow 95%-confidence intervals.

Immigrants and non-immigrants showed the same age and gender-related variations in health care utilization, as also observed previously [16]. Nonetheless, distinct differences between immigrants and non-immigrants were observed. Children in immigrant families had lower contact rates with general practice in daytime and out-of-hours than non-immigrant children. A Danish study reported a lower morbidity in children of immigrants than in non-immigrants [17] including children of "refugee" origin as well ass "job-seeker" origin, which may explain this discrepancy, but socio-cultural barriers could also be involved and should be considered in future studies. Male refugees often suffer from post-traumatic stress conditions leading to various psychiatric and somatic symptoms, which are especially seen among men from the Middle East [18]. The high rate of contact with general practice for both men and women from Palestine and the especially high contact rate to the acute services for men from Palestine may point to special need for care for refugees as well as their relatives. The markedly decrease in contact rates for older immigrants is probably due to simple age-confounding. Use of the health care system increases steeply with age, and the last age group in this study may be too wide to accurately reflect differences in age distribution between immigrants and non-immigrants, particularly in the light of other observations of high self-reported morbidity among older immigrants [19, 20]. This observation may be rooted in alienation with the system and language problems. It is known from daily practice, though, that some older immigrants visit their countries of origin for long periods, which could also play a part. More analytical research is needed to answer these questions.

The relatively lower rate of telephone consultations among immigrants probably reflects language difficulties and socio-cultural barriers. Immigrants are not used to this form of consultation, which is comparatively frequently used in the Danish setting, and negative attitudes have been reported [2]. In many instances a translator is needed [1] when immigrants require health care services, in which case a meeting in the general practitioner's surgery is required. The adult immigrants have a high contact rate with the out-of-hours service and casualty departments, but extant literature provides little explanation for this. The accessibility of the acute services without prior arranged consultation can attract immigrants not fully informed and aware about the use of acute health care services in Denmark. The out-of-hours service and casualty departments do not provide optimal conditions for handling non-acute cases and communication problems. As many contacts as possible should therefore be treated during the daytime in general practice where previous knowledge of the patient and translators are available.

It is an open question to which extent the present results may apply to other countries. The Danish health care system offers free and unreferred primary health care services (including the casualty departments) and therefore may not easily be compared with health care systems with fee-for-service and other referral systems to the acute services. As mentioned above, the immigrants' background, morbidity and social status in Denmark are important factors and should be taken into account in addition to individual and interactive factors when interpreting the results [11]. If equity is a goal in health care, we should seek more knowledge of the special needs of immigrants to evaluate whether their actual use of the services is adequate. The results of our descriptive study especially indicate possible problems for refugee men and the use of acute services by adult immigrants.

Referencer

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