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ABSTRACT
In Southern European societies such as the Portuguese, family and civil society play a relevant role in welfare policies, acting as complementary or supplementary ‘safety-nets’ to the state. In times of crises, migrants’ access to healthcare is not only questioned but put at risk. This paper unveils the specific roles played by Civil Society Organisations’ (CSOs) in providing healthcare to migrants in the aftermath of TROIKA in Portugal. By categorising different types of CSOs based on their articulation with the State, and the health service delivery model adopted, we show how CSOs configure themselves differently ranging from ‘service delivers’ to migrants’ ‘advocates’, adopting responses that vary between aid to co-production.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to everyone who participated in the project, in particular with Jessica Lopes who integrated the research team and gave very valuable suggestions for this article
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There is a current critical debate on ‘humanitarianism’ led by Fassin (Citation2012) in relation with migration and asylum seeking, which analyse also the role of CSOs. However this debate goes beyond this paper (see for instance Ambrosini (Citation2022)).
2 Project design adopted a broad definition of health providers to include different types of organizations (public, private, etc) that offer health related services, whether they are direct medical aid or that facilitate access.
3 Current discussion on this topic would probably frame ‘welfare society’ in the broader context of humanitarianism.
4 Law n° 48/90 on Bases of Health of August 24.
5 Further reading: Branco (2017).
6 We anonymized the organizations using fictional names.
7 Further reading about the process of administrative reorganization of NHS: Author1 et al.
8 During the global economic recession, the NHS doubled their fees, introduced new co-payments for complementary diagnostic tests and prevented irregular migrants from accessing regular services (OPSS Citation2015). Since the end of Troika, fees were decreased first, and then abolished for legal residents in 2019. However, irregular migrants still pay fees; they are considered sporadic users so cannot access family doctors (Lei 95/2019; Lei 37/2022).
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Notes on contributors
Beatriz Padilla
Beatriz Padilla is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department and Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida. She was Associate Research Professor at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISTE-IUL) and Associate Professor at the University of Minho, in Portugal. She has coordinated several international and national research projects and networks in the field of migrations. Her main areas of specialization are international migrations, diversity and inclusion, health, gender and public policies. She has carried out fieldwork in European and Latin American countries as well as in the United States. She has published widely.
Simone Castellani
Simone Castellani is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cadiz and associate researcher at CIES-Iscte carrying out the project Health Care in Mobility (HC-Mob), which focuses on the transnational health protection of Southern EU migrants in a re-nationalized Europe. His topics of research are related to the international migratory processes. Specifically, he has studied the Latino American migration flows toward Southern Europe, and the new Southern European labour migration flows toward Germany. Furthermore, in the recent past, he has investigated the topics of transnational social protection and health bricolage integrating international research projects. His research has been published in journals as Journal of Industrial Relation, International Migration, Comparative Migration Studies, among others.
Vera Rodrigues
Vera Rodrigues is a PhD student in Urban Studies at ISCTE-IUL and holds a PhD grant (SFRH/BD/144918/2019) from the Portuguese National Fund for Scientific Research. Her dissertation explores how migrants access healthcare and what kind of health services are offered to them, especially in superdiverse urban metropolitan areas, such as Lisbon and Boston. She also has an MA in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In addition, she has experience working on transnational research projects funded by the European Union carried out at CIES-Iscte. Her research interests are related to health and migration in ethnic urban spaces.