Despite legislative attempts to outlaw discrimination, inequalities persist across Western healthcare settings. Experiences of discrimination are perceived in various ways including exclusion from decision-making processes in healthcare interactions, being treated with disrespect and health concerns dismissed and trivialized. To date, evidence on ethnic/migrant discrimination in European healthcare settings remains limited, scattered and fragmented, and largely qualitative. Our study aims to fill this gap by analysing quantitative data from a multi-methods cross-national European study “The Welfare Bricolage” Project that examines healthcare usage in superdiverse neighbourhoods in Germany, UK, Sweden and Portugal. The selected countries represent four welfare regime “ideal types”. Using an analytical sample of 1,838 residents, we ask four research questions:

1) Are migrants more likely to experience subjective discrimination in healthcare?2) Does this experience vary by welfare regime?3) Does health literacy and trust in doctor mitigate experience of subjective discrimination?4) Is subjective discrimination correlated with self-rated health?

To assess perceived discrimination by healthcare professionals, a series of binary logistic regressions were fitted controlling for migrant status, age, gender, education, language ability, self-rated health, health literacy, and trust in doctors. Indicative findings suggest variations in healthcare settings that migrants in Germany and Portugal were more likely to feel discriminated, and that health literacy and trust in doctor do mitigate this experience.

About the Speaker

Sin Yi Cheung is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University and an elected Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She is Co-Director of Research and formerly International Director on the Senior Management Team in the School of Social Sciences. She convenes the interdisciplinary Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Diversity (MEAD) Research Group. Her research focuses on examining different forms of social inequalities in contemporary societies, ranging from ethnic penalties in the labour market, refugee integration and health, education and the economy, to children in social care. Sin Yi’s research has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the European Union, Nuffield Foundation, Health and Care Research Wales. She was a full panel member of the UKRI REF2021 Research Excellence Framework Social Work & Social Policy Sub-panel. Currently she sits on the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) Independent Advisory Board and the Humanities and Social Science Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She served on editorial boards of the BSA journal Sociology and the ASA journal Sociology of Education, and is Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers of Sociology: Race and Ethnicity.

Experience of subjective discrimination in healthcare in superdiverse areas: evidence in four European countries

Date: June 7, 2023 (Wed)

Time: 2:00PM – 3:00PM

Venue: CPD-3.29

Speaker: Prof. Sin Yi Cheung

Registration: https://bit.ly/healthcare230607