Reflections on migrant and refugee health in Malaysia and the ASEAN region

BMC Proceedings, Apr 2018

Migrants and refugees face challenges accessing both healthcare and good social determinants of health in Malaysia. Participants at the “Migrant and Refugee Health in Malaysia workshop, Kuala Lumpur, 9-10 November 2017” scoped these challenges within the regional ASEAN context, identifying gaps in knowledge and practical steps forward to improve the evidence base in the Malaysia.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs12919-018-0100-6.pdf

Reflections on migrant and refugee health in Malaysia and the ASEAN region

Pocock et al. BMC Proceedings Reflections on migrant and refugee health in Malaysia and the ASEAN region Nicola S. Pocock 0 Rapeepong Suphanchaimat 2 Chee Khoon Chan 1 Erwin Martinez Faller 6 Nicholas Harrigan 5 Veena Pillai 4 Kolitha Wickramage 3 0 United Nations University International Institute of Global Health , Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia 1 Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Malaya , Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia 2 International Health Policy Program, Ministry of Public Health , Nonthaburi , Thailand 3 Migration Health Division, International Organization for Migration, UN Migration Agency , Manila , Philippines 4 Dhi Consulting & Training , Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia 5 Department of Sociology, Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia 6 Migrant Workers Health Research Network, School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, Management & Science University , Shah Alam , Malaysia Migrants and refugees face challenges accessing both healthcare and good social determinants of health in Malaysia. Participants at the “Migrant and Refugee Health in Malaysia workshop, Kuala Lumpur, 9-10 November 2017” scoped these challenges within the regional ASEAN context, identifying gaps in knowledge and practical steps forward to improve the evidence base in the Malaysia. Migrant health; Refugee health - From Migrant and Refugee Health in Malaysia and the ASEAN region Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 09-10 November 2017 Introduction Globally, there were an estimated 258 million international migrants in 2017, 80 million of whom resided in Asia and 42% of whom were female [ 1 ]. There were an estimated 150 million migrant workers worldwide in 2013 [ 2 ]. With accelerating population movement worldwide, “migration is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be managed” [ 3 ]. Malaysia hosts an estimated 4–6 million documented and undocumented migrant workers mainly in construction, agriculture, manufacturing and services and domestic work [ 4 ]. Malaysia also hosts a registered refugee population of 152,000 mainly from Myanmar [ 5 ], and is a destination country for human trafficking. To examine migrant health in this context, UNU-IIGH organized a 2-day invitation-only workshop on Migrant and Refugee Health in Malaysia on 9–10 November 2017. Over 40 participants from industry, medical professions, civil society and academia in Malaysia attended, including regional speakers presenting case studies of migrant health inclusion from Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as well as several NGO service providers in Malaysia and Singapore. The workshop aimed to identify gaps in knowledge and promising interventions or policies to improve migrant and refugee health in Malaysia. In this short report, we identify key lessons from the workshop that can inform the direction of future research and practice for migrant health in ASEAN. Occupational and mental health needs Occupational health and mental health needs among migrant workers are many, with evidence severely lacking in this area. High prevalence of workplace accidents among migrant workers indicated a need for better enforcement of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) laws. Nepali migrants are the second largest group among documented migrants in Malaysia after Indonesians, with an estimated 566,184 present in the country in June 2015 [ 6 ]. Nepali migrants have high death rates in Malaysia, with an average of one worker dying a day in recent years [ 7 ], which warrants further investigation. Preliminary results from an ongoing study presented at the workshop indicated that cardiovascular and suicide cases were the leading fatalities reported to the Embassy of Nepal in 2015. About 80% of deaths underwent medically certified post-mortems, but questions remained about the accuracy of causes of death information for the more ambiguous categories. © United Nations University. 2018 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 3.0 IGO License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/igo/legalcode), which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon this article or a part thereof, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. In any reproduction of this article there should not be any suggestion that UNU or this article endorse any specific organization or products. The use of the UNU logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article's original URL. Asylum seekers and refugees had high prevalence of common mental health disorders including depression, anxiety and PTSD, linked to past trauma and particu (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs12919-018-0100-6.pdf

Nicola S. Pocock, Rapeepong Suphanchaimat, Chee Khoon Chan, Erwin Martinez Faller, Nicholas Harrigan, Veena Pillai, Kolitha Wickramage. Reflections on migrant and refugee health in Malaysia and the ASEAN region, BMC Proceedings, 2018, pp. 4, Volume 12, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1186/s12919-018-0100-6