Refugees’ health and primary care research: A co-occurrence network analysis during a decade

Problem

Universal primary healthcare services play an integral role in supporting and optimising the health and wellbeing of Asylum seekers and refugees. Providing access to vaccinations and primary care is an important priority to ensure that migrants’ health needs are addressed. This study aimed to objectively describe the knowledge domain and emerging trends of refugees’ health in primary care research.

Approach

This research was of the type applied, scientometric, and descriptive. The author conducted co-occurrence network analyses to graphically depict the relationships between the extracted words. 109 journal articles published on refugees and primary care during the last decade (2014-2024) have been reviewed. First, basic publishing and citation data were gathered using the Scopus database. MeSH terms of the articles were reviewed and categorized. The co-occurrence matrix of was used by the Ucinet software to calculate parameters including degree centrality and betweenness centrality. The results of these analyses were then used to conduct a social network analysis (SNA) aimed at clarifying relationships among high-frequency words for the purposes of data quantification and visualization. The Micro Social Network Analysis indicators, such as degree centrality and betweenness centrality, and macro-indicators such as size and density have been used.

Findings

193 nodes (words) has been identified in the network. The keywords with high co-occurrence were mental health, health care delivery, health services accessibility, and access to healthcare, which proved that the focus of research in the past few years has been turned to refugees’ mental health and their access to primary care services. Health services accessibility, Health care delivery, Health Services Needs and demands had the highest degree centrality which show the importance of these terms in the network, while health equity and social needs had the lowest degree centrality. Moreover, Health care delivery, mental health, and health services accessibility had the highest betweenness centrality, identified as the vital points that provide important bridging connections between two research interests. The author finds that centrality measures can be useful in identifying keywords that appear in various contexts of primary care and refugees.

Consequences

Trending keywords could be used as a reference for future research. The presentation of the thematic map of the articles will make the researchers more aware of the status of the research conducted and the subject's gap. The results of this study revealed that the top three main terms with the highest co-occurrence frequency also exhibited the highest degree centrality. It could help readers broaden innovative ideas and discover new research area opportunities, and also served as important indicators for host health system governance policymaking. This is a call for health equity agenda in primary health care research.