Prior to the UNHCR community-based PMTCT protocol, pregnant refugee women living with HIV were unable to access essential PMTCT services. Refugee women are now able to have access to a
comprehensive PMTCT programme.
Refugees are increasingly migrating to urban areas, but little research has been conducted to compare health and wellbeing outcomes of urban refugees with those based in camps. This analytic cross-sectional study investigated differences in health-related quality of life (QoL) for urban and camp-based refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, and assessed the influences of both the environment and the perceived environment on refugees’ health-related QoL using the WorldHealth Organization’s Quality of Life scale (WHOQOL-BREF.) Data for urban refugees were drawn from an administrative database used by an international agency that serves refugee populations in South Africa.
Data for camp-based refugees were collected via surveys conducted at two refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa. Refugees in urban environments reported significantly higher satisfaction with overall health, physical health and environmental wellbeing than refugees placed in camps. In multivariate analyses, urban environments were associated with better physical health for refugees,
Complex humanitarian emergencies are characterised by a break-down of health systems. All-cause mortality increases and non-violent excess deaths (predominantly due to infectious diseases) have been shown to outnumber violent deaths even in exceptionally brutal conflicts. However, affected populations are very heterogeneous and refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and resident (non-displaced) populations differ substantially in their access to health services. We aim to show how this translates into health outcomes by quantifying excess all-cause mortality in emergencies by displacement status. As standard data sources on mortality only poorly represent these populations, we use data from CEDAT, a database established by aid agencies to share operational health data collected for planning, monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian aid. We obtained 1759 Crude Death Rate (CDR) estimates from emergency assessments conducted between 1998 and 2012. We define excess mortality as the ratio of CDR in emergency assessments over ‘baseline CDR’ (as reported in the World Development Indicators).