Abstract
BackgroundNo recent Australian studies or literature, provide evidence of the extent of coverage of multicultural health issues in Australian healthcare research. A series of systematic literature reviews in three major Australian healthcare journals were undertaken to discover the level, content, coverage and overall quality of research on multicultural health. Australian healthcare journals selected for the study were The Medical Journal of Australia (MJA), The Australian Health Review (AHR), and The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health (ANZPH). Reviews were undertaken of the last twelve (12) years (1996-August 2008) of journal articles using six standard search terms: 'non-English-speaking', 'ethnic', 'migrant', 'immigrant', 'refugee' and 'multicultural'.ResultsIn total there were 4,146 articles published in these journals over the 12-year period. A total of 90 or 2.2% of the total articles were articles primarily based on multicultural issues. A further 62 articles contained a major or a moderate level of consideration of multicultural issues, and 107 had a minor mention.ConclusionsThe quantum and range of multicultural health research and evidence required for equity in policy, services, interventions and implementation is limited and uneven. Most of the original multicultural health research articles focused on newly arrived refugees, asylum seekers, Vietnamese or South East Asian communities. While there is some seminal research in respect of these represented groups, there are other communities and health issues that are essentially invisible or unrepresented in research. The limited coverage and representation of multicultural populations in research studies has implications for evidence-based health and human services policy.
Highlights
No recent Australian studies or literature, provide evidence of the extent of coverage of multicultural health issues in Australian healthcare research
Three hundred and fifty articles were accessed through the eMJA search
A further two articles accessed through the other two search strategies and not accessed by the eMJA search were added to those included in the study [15,16]
Summary
No recent Australian studies or literature, provide evidence of the extent of coverage of multicultural health issues in Australian healthcare research. Mainstream healthcare research can be perceived as being neglectful of cross-cultural research It is frequently seen as methodologically difficult to do with significant interpretative problems [1,2]. It can be argued that to ignore populations with limited English proficiency may result in poor study validity and generalisabilty, could be considered discriminatory in Representations of immigrants have shifted considerably in the period since the end of World War Two. Thirty years ago cross-cultural health researchers would have studied ‘migrant patients’, or, a little later, ‘patients from non-English-speaking backgrounds’-at that time, a definable (constructed) field of study, which assumed that the similarities within these groups allowed them to be neatly categorised, labelled and understood as one entity. Conceptions (and re-conceptions) of the field of immigrant health study are a product of history, are relational, and have associated socially constructed meanings
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