Original article“There Is No Help Out There and If There Is, It's Really Hard to Find”: A Qualitative Study of the Health Concerns and Health Care Access of Latino “DREAMers”
Section snippets
Methods
An interdisciplinary research team from the University of California conducted a qualitative study utilizing community-based participatory methods [17], engaging a 10-member advisory board of immigration advocates and health policy stakeholders in study design, implementation, and validation of results. All procedures were approved by the University of California San Francisco Institutional Review Board.
Recruitment of this elusive population was guided by the advisory board and conducted by
Results
The 61 focus group participants were 18–31 years old. Fifty-nine percent were females, and 87% were from Mexico (Table 2). Participants identified barriers to care and described the ways in which they attempted to seek care despite their limited insurance and health care options. They also identified a variety of health care needs, ranging from mental health problems related to their immigration history and undocumented status to difficulty accessing primary and specialty care due to their
Discussion
This study is the first to describe the health concerns and barriers to care for DACA-eligible young adults. In general, young adults have lower health care utilization and higher rates of certain negative health outcomes, such as sexually transmitted diseases and unintentional injury, than adolescents and older adults in the US [6]. This study indicates that for DACA-eligible young adults, many of whom have experienced trauma and long-term stress associated with their undocumented status,
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the following people for their contributions for this project: Laurel Lucia, M.P.P. (UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education), Efrain Talamantes, M.D., M.B.A. (UCLA Center for Health Policy Research), and Max Hadler, M.P.H., M.A. (UCLA Center for Health Policy Research), our interns Arlette Lozano and Kathy Latthivongskorn, our advisory board members, the community-based organizations that assisted with focus groups, and the many participants who shared their
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Conflicts of Interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.