title: Connection between the meaning of health and interaction with health professionals: caring for immigrant women.
abstract: The meaning of health perceived by adult immigrant women in Canada is discussed from the perspectives of immigration, culture, and lived experience to understand their encounters with health care professionals. Authors base their findings on the thematic analysis of focus group data. Immigrant women viewed health as the outcome of a web of interactions between conditions of mental, physical, social, emotional, environmental, and spiritual well-being, appealing to both biomedical and phenomenological ideologies. Our analyses of qualitative data revealed that the disagreements noted by immigrant women when interacting with health care professionals were due to the discrepancies between their cultural views of health and the dominant biomedical perspective.
authors: Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. swarna.weerasinghe@dal.ca
authors: Swarna
authors: S
authors: Weerasinghe
authors: Terry
authors: T
authors: Mitchell
mesh_terms: D000069:Acculturation; D000368:Aged; D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology*; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D015438:Health Behavior / Q000208:ethnology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D033262:Narration; D009674:Nova Scotia; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000208:ethnology; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D016387:Women's Health