Analyzing legislative debate on immigrant health policy in europe: France, Belgium, and the UK

The international health research community has recently focused on identifying barriers that immigrants around the world face in obtaining health care. European nations have been at the forefront of developing policies to respond to the health needs of both legal and illegal immigrants. However, discrepancies remain between international community's call for universal access to health care and the current policies in European nations. While the Health for Undocumented Migrants and Asylum Seekers network and others have published recommendations on immigrant health policy for European nations, and individual nations have taken on isolated policy issues, there has been little research on the actual debates taking place over immigrant health policy in European legislatures or on how these legislatures conceptualize the issue of immigrant health care. This research will qualitatively examine what we can learn from the themes presented in legislative debates over immigrant health care in the case studies of France, Belgium, and the UK by analyzing legislative debate transcripts from each country between the years of 2002 to 2012. Each case study represents a unique policy and immigrant profile. These transcripts will be coded to pull out the primary factors that are mentioned in the debate and investigate how they compare to the issues and themes presented in policy recommendations. Preliminary results will be available by mid-winter. These results will allow advocacy, medical and political groups to identify the most significant factors in immigrant health policy, and enable other countries to learn from these debates in establishing their own policies.