Reaching migrants for preventive care: Optimization of access and utilization

Migrants belong to the hard-to-reach group in health and preventive care. Essential criteria for the sustainable effectiveness of preventive and health promotion consist in the proper selection of target groups and successfully approaching them. The knowledge of possible barriers that make the access to preventive care and health promotion more difficult, e.g. low health literacy, that means the difficulties of linguistic understanding or the low acceptance regarding the provider, is necessary in order to select adequate access possibilities to the defined target groups. Up to now, for this and particularly for the ethno-specific health behaviour of migrants in Germany information hardly exist. So far, there are only a few preventive offers which are target group focussed. The use of native speaking preventive consultants is an attempt to improve the access to preventive care for migrants by low threshold come and access-structures.