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Oral Health and Dental Care Pathways of Humanitarian Migrants.The purpose of this project is to better understand the concerns of newly-arrived refugees and asylum seekers, regarding the health of their mouth and how they seek dental care in Canada. The project is a collaboration between researchers in the Faculties of Dentistry at McGill University and the University of Toronto. Participants in the study are invited to a dental clinic where they complete a questionnaire about their health and health-related lifestyle choices and have their mouth (teeth and gums) examined. Community organisations in Montreal and Toronto are partners in this project. After careful planning, from designing and optimising the questionnaire to standardising the dental examination and training the data collectors, we are excited to begin our recruitment drive and envisage the completion of data collection by Summer 2021. The results and conclusions of this study will help to inform policies and programs to improve the oral health of humanitarian migrants. |
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A Program Theory for Community-level Oral Health Promotion Interventions in the Humanitarian Migrant Communities: A Realist Review.Humanitarian migrants usually arrive in their host countries with poor oral health conditions. Community-level oral health promotion programs have complex and linear patterns. Literature mainly focuses on the effectiveness of these programs while the underlying causal mechanisms leading to the observed outcomes in those programs remain underexplored. Through conducting a realist review, we will try to understand how these programs work, for whom and in what contexts. |
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Advancing a Program Theory for Community-level Oral Health Promotion Interventions in the Humanitarian Migrants: A Realist Review.Humanitarian migrants are people who are forced to move away from their habitual residence. Experiencing difficult migration trajectories leave them in vulnerable conditions. Many experience socioeconomic problems and deficient nutrition which can result in poor oral health level. Thus, community organizations develop and implement oral health promotion programs for these populations. To date, there is little literature evaluating the effectiveness details of these interventions. In order to optimize successful development and implementation of these programs, there is a need to evaluate how these programs work in practice and which factors helped or inhibited them to achieve their desired outcomes. Therefore, McGill’s Migrant Oral Health Program (MOHP) led by Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald and Dr. Belinda Nicolau has designed and launched a knowledge synthesis evaluation to understand how community-level oral health promotion programs for humanitarian migrants work, under which circumstances, and why. This project is using a realist review methodology. Realist review is a theory-driven program evaluation methodology used in evidence-based policy. Realist review is an approach to develop causal explanation of observed outcomes in context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations. CMOs explain how an outcome is caused by the mechanisms which are activated in the specific context. These CMOs form the basis for program theory which will be evolved through the research. Begun by a current Master’s student (Negin Eslamiamirabadi), the protocol for this review has been registered in PROSPERO and submitted for peer-review publication. The initial program theory and preliminary search strategies has been advanced. Fatemeh Keshani’s Master’s study will focus on data extraction, quality assessment and developing the final program theory. In addition, working with Migrant Oral Health Project (MOHP) team, she will be involved in developing stakeholder consultations to verify the program theory. Next steps for MOHP will be to develop and implement an oral health program for humanitarian migrants in Montreal based upon the review findings. |
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Oral health experiences of refugee children in Montreal and their parents’ perspectives on access to care.People who migrate to evade harsh conditions in their home country, such as environmental disasters, violence, and war, are called refugees. Children represent almost half of the refugee population. Even though refugees generally resettle in Canada, they still face issues after arrival. Refugees in Canada have high oral health needs and may experience challenges in accessing oral care. Improving their oral health is a global priority, and this applies to refugee children. This study is innovative in that it is the first to directly include the voices of refugee children in oral health research. The objectives of this Master's study by Manav Preet Singh Saini are to explore and understand how refugee children experience oral health and access to oral care, and how refugee parents in Montreal experience accessing oral healthcare for their children. We have used qualitative description methodology, and our conceptual framework draws upon the public health model of the dental care process. Participants include refugee children aged 6-12 years and their parents. We have conducted face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. Data is being analyzed using a thematic approach including interview debriefing, transcript coding, data display and interpretation. Our aim is to work together with refugee families to improve their children’s access to oral care. The results will contribute to the oral health of refugees in Canada by addressing the gap in knowledge related to the experiences of refugee children in Montreal regarding access to oral healthcare and their experience of that care. |
