Julie MONTOYA, PhD Student, Bernadette TILLARD, Professor. CLERSE, UMR 8019, Lille1, France Migrant Children and Families This PhD thesis in progress, entitled « Romani children’s health care trajectories », would like... [ view full abstract ]
Julie MONTOYA, PhD Student, Bernadette TILLARD, Professor.
CLERSE, UMR 8019, Lille1, France
Migrant Children and Families
This PhD thesis in progress, entitled « Romani children’s health care trajectories », would like to question the French health care system by observing and analysing children’s health care trajectories and understand what specific health care trajectories could teach us about poorest children’s health care trajectories. Moreover, romani children’s trajectories highlight health care trajectories in a migration context.
The observations of romani children’s health care trajectories are led in a shantytown located in Pas-de-Calais, county in north of France, thanks to a volunteer of Médecins du Monde. The association works on the « Mining area mission » engaged with people identified like Romani and managed health questions on the slum scale. The fieldground began on February 2015 as Médecins du Monde’s volunteer. This position allows conducting participant observation at mission’s two times: “monthly trips” and “health mediation”. To resume, a “monthly trip” consist in conducting consultations for a day on the slum, either on patient’s caravan or in Médecins du Monde’s truck. Health mediation is matter of mediator volunteers, people who are not health professionals. They make appointment for patients, accompany them, play translator’s role as possible. In fact, they make the connection between residents and external health professionals.
In the slum, approximately two hundred people live. Half of them are minors, who live in caravans. “Minors” is preferred rather than “children” because some young families are composed by an adult father, a minor mother and one or two young children.
Moreover, few habitants speak french. Mainly coming from Romania, families speak romanian and spanish according to their migration trajectories.
The shantytown population is not uniform: it depends on individual age, family composition and financial resources. To visualize families’ living conditions, it is useful to know that the slum has no sanitation facilities, no electricity and no waste collection. There is only a single water supply at the entrance of the site.
With reference to ethnographic methodology, the fieldground consists in a long immersion on the fieldwork with observations and interviews, focusing on three topics:
• The mission’s functioning: interactions between volunteers on the slum, travel times and team meetings.
• Minors’ health care trajectories: interactions between volunteers and families, between patients and health professionals.
• The shantytown’s life: interactions between residents, and between residents and external persons.
The Médecins du Monde's interventions are conducted in two temporalities: monthly trips in the slum and occasional health mediations in different hospitals. Both give opportunity to analyse different kinds of pathways: long health care trajectories, short health care trajectories and emergency health care trajectories, for example during hepatitis A epidemic in April 2015.The communication is focused on Loredana’s long health care trajectory. She is a two years old Romanian girl, affected by a facial paralysis. As a first step, the paper will present her life course inextricably linked to her health care trajectory. As a second step, arising from observations, we analyse her mother’s place and volunteers’ place in Loredana’s trajectory, the importance of play during consultations, and the “medical knowledge” acquisitions by the family.
Migration and minorities in child welfare , Other topics
