RESUMEN
Objectives: Refugee populations arriving to the United States report high rates of exposure to trauma and associated psychiatric distress that may necessitate referrals to mental health services. Although refugee arrivals receive a voluntary health screening, mental health screening is not routine. Public health providers report that one barrier to mental health screening concerns uncertainty about how to connect refugee patients to mental health services. This article reports essential components of successful and unsuccessful care coordination related to mental health referrals of refugees.Design: A community based participatory research study explored the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful mental health referrals of refugee patients through an online survey of refugee providers. Ten coders sorted provider stories of mental health referrals into critical incidents that were analyzed using principle components analysis (PCA). Care coordination emerged as an important characteristic of referral success. This category of care coordination was analyzed further into components of successful and unsuccessful care coordination using a higher order PCA. A similar process was followed examining providers' perceptions of why care coordination was successful or unsuccessful.Results: Components describing successful care coordination include ongoing communication between providers, scheduling initial appointments directly, access to emergency mental health services, and case management provided by health plan staff. Components related to unsuccessful care coordination describe the failure to communicate about care or establish appointments in a timely manner and the failure to resolve access barriers. Trust in relationships among providers and between refugee patients and providers was an important reason why care coordination was successful.Conclusion: Ongoing communication between providers is essential to successful mental health referrals of patients with refugee backgrounds. Multidisciplinary systems of care may benefit from education about the importance of building relationships among providers and the essential components of successful care coordination.
Asunto(s)
Servicios de Salud Mental , Refugiados , Investigación Participativa Basada en la Comunidad , Accesibilidad a los Servicios de Salud , Humanos , Salud Mental , Derivación y Consulta , Refugiados/psicología , Estados UnidosRESUMEN
In this community based participatory research study, we explored key characteristics of mental health referrals of refugees using stories of providers collected through an on-line survey. Ten coders sorted 60 stories of successful referrals and 34 stories of unsuccessful referrals into domains using the critical incident technique. Principal components analysis yielded categories of successful referrals that included: active care coordination, establishing trust, proactive resolution of barriers, and culturally responsive care. Unsuccessful referrals were characterized by cultural barriers, lack of care coordination, refusal to see refugees, and system and language barriers. Recommendations for training and policy are discussed.
Asunto(s)
Trastornos Mentales/terapia , Servicios de Salud Mental , Derivación y Consulta , Refugiados , Barreras de Comunicación , Investigación Participativa Basada en la Comunidad , Asistencia Sanitaria Culturalmente Competente , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos , Análisis de Componente Principal , Investigación Cualitativa , Encuestas y Cuestionarios , ConfianzaRESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Karen refugees from Burma are one of the largest refugee groups currently resettling in the USA. Karen people have endured decades of civil war and human rights violations, leaving them more likely to develop serious mental health disorders. There is a noted lack of brief, culturally validated tools present in primary care settings for detecting posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) in Karen refugees. OBJECTIVE: To create the Karen Mental Health Screener, a five-question screening tool used to identify depression and PTSD and to validate it against a clinical reference standard. METHODS: This validation study was conducted during a primary care visit. Participants completed a 20-item questionnaire using a 4-point visual aid and the PTSD and MDD portions of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders (SCID-CV for DSM-IV) as the reference standard. Both the questionnaire and the relevant sections of the SCID-IV were rigorously translated and administered by trained researchers along with a trained Karen interpreter. RESULTS: Logistic regression models and receiver operating characteristic curve analyses were used to determine a subset of items that could be used to construct a screener to identify Karen patients who were most likely to have PTSD and/or MDD. A final five-question screener was created with very strong performance characteristics. With a clinical cut score of 4, these items displayed very strong performance characteristics with sensitivity = 0.96, specificity = 0.97, positive predicted value = 0.83 and negative predicted value = 0.99. CONCLUSION: The Karen Mental Health Screener is a valid measure for detecting PTSD and major depression in Karen people from refugee backgrounds presenting in a primary care setting.
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Trastorno Depresivo Mayor/diagnóstico , Atención Primaria de Salud/métodos , Refugiados/psicología , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático/diagnóstico , Adulto , Trastorno Depresivo Mayor/psicología , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Tamizaje Masivo , Trastornos Mentales/diagnóstico , Trastornos Mentales/psicología , Salud Mental , Persona de Mediana Edad , Mianmar/etnología , Curva ROC , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y Especificidad , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático/psicología , Encuestas y Cuestionarios , Estados UnidosRESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Karen refugees have suffered traumatic experiences that affect their physical and mental health in resettlement. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends assessing traumatic histories and mental health symptoms during initial public health screening. This article reports the traumatic experiences that Karen refugees were able to describe during a short screening and contributes knowledge to existing human rights documentation systems. METHODS: Four semi-structured and open-ended items asked about lifetime experiences of war trauma and torture. Interviews were completed with adult, Karen refugees during their initial public health screening. Experiences of war trauma and torture were coded using the extensive Human Rights Information and Documentation (HURIDOCS) Micro-thesauri coding system. Additional codes were created to describe experiences not captured by existing codes. RESULTS: Over 85% of 179 Karen people interviewed experienced life-threatening war trauma. All participants who reported war trauma or torture stories were able to describe at least one event. New war trauma codes proposed include: widespread community fear, systematic destruction/burning of house or village, exposure to dead bodies, orphaned in the context of war, injury caused by a landmine, fear of Thai police or deportation from Thailand, and harm or killings in the context of war. New torture codes include: forced portering; forced to be a human landmine sweep; forced to be a soldier, including child soldier; forced contact with a dead body; and removal of the eyes. CONCLUSION: Karen refugees were able to report traumatic experiences in the context of a brief health screening. The findings confirm existing reports of human rights violations against Karen people and suggest that additional codes be added to the HURIDOCS Micro-thesauri system that is used by torture treatment centers. Understanding the nature of traumatic experiences of this group is important for health providers working with resettled Karen refugees in their countries of resettlement. Health providers may need specialized training to understand the traumatic histories of this new refugee group, learn how to initiate conversations about trauma and its impact on health, and make appropriate mental health referrals in the context of a brief public health screening.
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Refugiados/psicología , Tortura , Heridas Relacionadas con la Guerra/etnología , Adulto , Femenino , Humanos , Entrevistas como Asunto , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Mianmar/etnología , Investigación Cualitativa , Encuestas y Cuestionarios , Tailandia , Estados UnidosRESUMEN
We examined the factor structure of measured posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a sample of West African civilian refugees who had fled the civil war in Sierra Leone between 2001 and 2006. Given that such war-affected populations are common but understudied in trauma research, our objective was to examine the similarities and differences in this factor structure compared to prevailing models of PTSD symptom structure. As part of treatment services provided in refugee camps, refugees (2,140 women, 1,662 men, 1 unknown) from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea completed the 17 symptoms portion of the Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale (PDS). We used exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to investigate whether there was a factor structure unique to this population, and made comparisons with the numbing, dysphoria, and aroused intrusion models. Results from the confirmatory analyses showed that the dysphoria model best fit the data (root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .062); however, exploratory analyses revealed that 3 items loaded differently than theoretically expected. Psychological distress cross-loaded on reexperiencing and avoidance factors and physiological reactivity loaded on the avoidance factor instead of the reexperiencing factor. The sleep difficulties item was not well explained, generally; the highest loading (λ = .22) was on the dysphoria factor.