Abstracts by keywords: migration
In June 2021, Schüttig and Sundmacher published the results of a Delphi survey and a retrospective data analysis in the “Monitor Healthcare Research” on how incorrect utilization in emergency rooms can potentially be avoided. They identified emergencies described by the authors as “outpatient-sensitive” and classified them in such a way that treatment could potentially be carried out by contracted doctors on an outpatient basis as part of standard care. As a result of a regression analysis, the authors showed a positive relationship between the proportion of people with a migrant background and the rate of outpatient-sensitive emergencies as defined by them. The authors suspect that this can be explained by cultural differences in the use of hospital emergency rooms, but also by language barriers (Schüttig and Sundmacher 2021). The following article is dedicated to the topic of how often and to what extent such a “language barrier” is to be expected among people with a migrant background and what measures are needed to reduce or perhaps completely eliminate it in the German healthcare system. For this purpose, we use our own research results from the last 25 years in the field of migration research/public health as well as generally accessible data from the Federal Statistical Office.