MCWH is pleased to have the opportunity to contribute our expertise and offer recommendations to the Australian Senate Inquiry on Universal Access to Reproductive Healthcare.
Our submission makes 16 recommendations focusing on addressing the existing barriers to universal access to reproductive healthcare for migrant and refugee women and gender diverse people living in Australia:
- Extend Medicare to include all migrants (irrespective of visa category);
- Resource primary care providers/practitioners, health organisations, and community-based organisations to provide culturally appropriate and responsive education on contraception;
- Abolish waiting periods and visa restrictions for all migrants, including in relation to temporary migrants on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, and overseas student health cover (OSHC) deed which is due to expire in June 2024, and within the Minister for Health’s power to remove;
- Offer all pregnant people safe, free or low cost, culturally appropriate and publicly funded pregnancy and abortion care;
- Establish a National Taskforce on abortion care, to review the complexities of accessing abortion care in Australia. The taskforce should address the nuanced barriers that communities, such as migrants, experience to ensure universality, and should involve all states and territories, health experts including care providers, community-led organisations and people with lived experience;
- Include migrant and refugee health as a key priority in regional organisational activity and planning (e.g. Primary Health Networks), including collecting information about migrant and refugee groups (e.g. visa/residency status, maternal country of birth, year of arrival in Australia, a request for an interpreter, and people’s preferred language) and collaborating with migrant organisations with relevant expertise and knowledge;
- Provide ongoing investment and support to develop a bilingual, bicultural health workforce that is professionally recognised, appropriately remunerated and specifically trained to deliver and work with communities on sexual and reproductive health;
- Upskill, resource and embed bilingual workers across sexual and reproductive healthcare services;
- Enhance the collaboration between primary care and the prevention sector. For example, improve referral pathways between clinical care and health education for migrant and refugee women and gender diverse people;
- Invest in and strengthen intersectional policy development and analysis to ensure that national policy at all levels impacts positively on migrant and refugee people’s capacity to access reproductive healthcare;
- Provide free, culturally responsive, voluntary, non-biased mental health support as an integral part of reproductive healthcare (including in relation to perinatal anxiety and depression, trauma, abortion counselling);
- Provide targeted, sustainable funding for migrant and refugee women’s health programs, including healthcare provision and access to abortion care;
- Bring culturally appropriate sexual and reproductive healthcare into the mainstream and into tertiary education settings by collaborating with migrant women’s organisations to develop best practice guidelines for culturally responsive service delivery;
- Support national (including rural, regional and remote), community-led, tailored preventative sexual and reproductive health education run by migrant women’s organisations and delivered to migrant women and gender diverse people by trained bilingual workers, on key sexual and reproductive health topics, including in FGM/C and reproductive coercion;
- Invest in research to better understand the barriers to migrant and refugee women and gender diverse people’s access to health literacy, including engagement with digital technologies;
- Invest in programs to build capacity of migrant and refugee women and gender diverse people to engage with digital technologies.