Transcultural Psychiatry: Inpatient-care strategies for international migrant population

Abstract

During the last years, Chile has experienced a pronounced demographic change with a sharp increase of international migrant population that has chosen the country as their destination for settling. Migration generates healthcare process and is well known as a risk factor for mental illness. Local health providers face the challenge of meeting the new needs and look for clinical strategies to ease and generate common spaces between patients and clinicians. Transcultural psychiatry, which studies the influence of culture in the clinical features and signs of mental illness and search for treatments, can set a basis to develop these new strategies. It also provides technical and theoretical frameworks that underline the cultural competence as the focus of the health service, considering the particular needs of the international migrant patients. In this work based in the experience of a service of liaison psychiatry in a general hospital in Santiago, we explain how the team of liaison psychiatry can assume the role to educate other health services by raising awareness about migration and health. In this context, we propose recommendations of goods practices for inpatient care that foster inclusion, dignity and equity in the health access.