ReHIn - a research project on Refugees' Health Integration
ReHIn aims to create web-based educational resources to raise awareness and enable integration of refugees into the EU health culture and system.
ReHIn at a glance
An objective of ReHIn is to support the integration of refugees in terms of using the health services. The web-based resources will provide information regarding the rights and the use of the health systems and will be made available in different languages.
To be able to develop these resources, we will need to understand the educational needs of refugees regarding the healthcare system better.
The project is a collaborative action research project between Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), University of Nottingham (UK), Aristotele University Thessaloniki (Greece) and Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain).
Funding and coordination
The research project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme and coordinated by the MINT group at Karolinska Institutet, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME).
More about ReHIn
Within this project we aim to create a number of creative digital resources to enable the integration of refugees into the European Union health culture. The fundamental objectives of ReHIn lay into the integration in terms of the use of the health services, but also in the way that health and medicine is practiced in EU in comparison to major refugees’ home countries. Through Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) and their combination into a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), ReHIn will foster respect and understanding for diversity in Health, intercultural and civic competences, but also it will enable health values and citizenship within the EU.
The ReHIn will create 6 creative digital resources that are going to be available to a wide audience of refugees through a MOOC, for the purpose of enabling the integration of refugees into the European Union Health Culture. The fundamental objectives of ReHIn lie within their integration in terms of their use of health services, but also in the way that health and medicine is practiced in EU. ReHIn’s co-creative health culture and audio-visual resources aim to be understandable by the majority of the refugees without necessarily speaking immediately the host country language. The dissemination and exploitation of ReHIn will be done both at EU welcoming points but also in the country where the refugees are settled by collaborating with NGOs and National services.
ReHIn will aim to:
- help refugees and migrants socialise and express themselves without necessarily speaking the host country language;
- allow them to learn platforms that foster respect and understanding for diversity, intercultural and civic competencies, inform refugees about democratic values and citizenship;
- give EU citizens the opportunity to discover, learn from and understand the values and cultures of refugees and migrants and rediscover and enrich their own; offer the possibility of collaboration with organisations in other sectors in order to stimulate a more comprehensive, rapid, effective and long-term response to this global challenge.
Besides the educational material, the RLOs and the MOOC, ReHIn will include a needs analysis, that will point out the exact educational needs in regard to the healthcare system and will include raw data from the partner countries; the evaluation of the project outputs for the purpose of providing feedback and improving the project and the best practises and guidelines, that will encourage and inform similar initiatives.
Integration
The integration of refugees is a dynamic and multifaceted two-way process which requires efforts by all parties concerned, including a preparedness on the part of refugees to adapt to the host society without having to forego their own cultural identity, and a corresponding readiness on the part of host communities and public institutions to welcome refugees and meet the needs of a diverse population.
Thus a society knowing the differences in Health culture will help more on the integration of refugees, but also allow the EU citizens to rediscover their own values. The process of integration is complex and gradual, comprising distinct but inter-related legal, economic, social and cultural dimensions, all of which are important for refugees’ ability to integrate successfully as fully included members of society.
ReHIn final report 2022
Following a needs analysis, workshops, interviews, and a modified Delphi study, the ReHIn project prioritized among important learning objectives in the educational interventions addressing health integration.
The kick-off of our project at Karolinska Institutet in 2019, was followed by a workshop which included
- academics,
- researchers,
- NGOs,
- clinicians, as well as
- refugees,
in order to get a better understanding of the healthcare needs of refugees, and to inform the educational priorities.
The workshop was followed by a modified Delphi study and findings from these have been submitted as an article to a scientific journal which is currently under review. Preliminary results have already been published in the INTED conference proceedings. We hope that our results will further inform and support the development of educational resources for refugees. The results from the needs analysis helped us identify the most significant educational needs in regard to refugees’ integration to the healthcare system.
- We published a video to better communicate the healthcare education needs of refugees.
RLO, Reusable Learning Object
- Following the Delphi study, ReHIn developed and evaluated six RLOs that are available through the Helm Open repository and are included in the IO2 report. RLOs are self-contained, web-based resources that consist of a mixture of multimedia elements such as audio, text, images and video and which engage the learner in interactive learning through the use of activities and assessments. They represent approx. 15 minutes of learning activity.
- For the development of the six RLOs, we followed a co-creation approach based on the ASPIRE methodology. This process was initiated by the C1 activity. Experts on refugees’ health, refugees, academics, healthcare professionals and NGO workers came together to co-design and develop the content of the six RLOs in the forms of storyboards, which were later developed into RLOs. Animation and translations were added to enhance the engagement, and RLOs' accessibility. The six RLOs were translated into the Arabic, as this was the most common language of the refugees in Europe at the time of the application submission.
- All ReHIn RLOs are openly accessible, shared under a Creative Common license, and can be used and reused not only by refugees, NGOs, and healthcare providers to help support the refugees and the migrants education and awareness, but also to inform the relevant staff and the public about the refugees’ health integration needs.
The co-creation followed the ASPIRE framework and the process is published: DOI:10.3233/SHTI210234. Details are included in the IO2 report.
The RLO topics are:
- RLO 1.PTSD - It's Ok to have these feelings;
- RLO 2: Importance of Dental Health Treatment;
- RLO 3: Relation to Healthcare;
- RLO 4: Unwanted pregnancy;
- RLO 5: Maternal depression: Break the silence;
- RLO 6: Fight against refugees loneliness is possible!
MOOC, Massive Open Online Course
ReHIn developed and evaluated a MOOC that massively disseminates important aspects and especially cultural aspects of healthcare that could enhance the refugees' health integration.
The MOOC has integrated the RLOS and is openly available online. A three-week course was developed to address the above topics and to discuss general, essential topics that could help and support refugees’ integration in the EU healthcare system. The content include introductory information, videos, the RLOs, learning activities including multiple choice questions, case-based formative, learning focused assessments as well as a forum where the participants can interact.
The weeks are organized as follows and details about the content can be found online, and in the IO3 report.
- Week 1: Accessibility and rights to health;
- Week 2: Sexual and reproductive health;
- Week 3: Mental health and well-being.
Multidisciplinary experts were involved in the co-development of the project.
Guidelines
- A video was developed to present our outputs
- Ten refugees evaluated the MOOC including the RLOs. The best practices (IO5) were compilated on a web-page
The objective of this guideline is to inform the wider audience including educators and healthcare organizations about how to create material about refugees, showing good practices that have happened in Europe to extract knowledge and aspects on which researchers, policymakers and NGOs can learn and improve when they develop their resources for refugees.
In a structured way that facilitates its analysis, IO5 presents a set of recommendations, lessons learned and suggestions to be taking into account before any further deployment of resources about refugees.
In order to disseminate our outputs, 4 multiplier events were conducted in Sweden, Greece, UK and Spain.
ReHIn MOOC
The ReHIn MOOC is a 3 week course for enabling the integration of refugees into the EU health culture. Through creative digital resources, students will learn about health services and healthcare systems.
News & Events
ReHIn MOOC
The ReHIn MOOC is released on November 7, 2022.
⇒ Read more and enroll (link).
Multiplier event ReHIn Erasmus+ 2022
Welcome to the multiplier event of the ReHIN (Refugee Health Integration) Erasmus+ project to disseminate all project outputs with a multidisciplinary audience.
⇒ Register to attend (link) on November 10, 2022.
ReHIN Kick off
To inaugurate the research project "Refugees' Health Integration - ReHIn", a kick-off was organised on 5 November 2019, at Karolinska Institutet, including stakeholders that represented non-governmental organizations (NGOs), policymakers, governmental organizations and researchers in the field.
Principal Investigator
Klas Karlgren
Principal ResearcherKlas Karlgren is a senior researcher at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and the Södersjukhuset hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.
He is also an associate professor at the SimArena simulation center at Bergen University College, Norway. He holds a Ph.D. (2003) in human-machine interaction and his research lies in the areas of medical education, technology-enhanced learning, computer-supported collaborative learning, and interaction design.
His current projects concern debriefing during simulation-based training, teamwork and communication during emergency codes at two major Swedish emergency departments, using mobiles to track learners during clinical practice periods and virtual patient training for decision-making in advanced trauma surgery and other healthcare fields.
Project Manager
Natalia Stathakarou
Project Coordinator;Phd StudentNatalia Stathakarou has a technical background and holds an MSc in medical informatics. She is a project coordinator in the department of LIME (Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics) at Karolinska Institutet and she has been acting as the Project Manager for the Erasmus+ Projects co-funded by the EU: WAVES, TAME, MEDIN, OER in Computational Biomedicin.
She is the Project Leader and technical expert for the current MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) in KI with focus on the system integration and learning analytics. She has been working with developing virtual patients for advanced trauma surgery and recently she took part into a project for integrating Virtual Patients in a Disaster Medicine course in Karolinska Institutet. Other interests are around feedback models integrated with VPs.