Persons with Refugee Experience Education Project - Interprofessional (PREP IP)

Project summary

The PREP IP project responds to the need of practicing rehabilitation professionals to develop key competencies to better meet the unique health needs refugees. Ultimately this will contribute to their health and well-being as well as to their inclusion, and social cohesion and community diversity. It will be achieved by:

• building the capacity of a transnational and transdisciplinary network of partners to jointly support health professionals
• developing open online course and open educational resources (OER) to provide accessible, inclusive, and equitable services to refugees
• documenting in a case study this unique partnership for inclusion, capturing experiences and strategies in building partnerships across sectors, professional, cultural and geographical boundaries.

PREP IP addresses two Erasmus+ program priorities: inclusion and digital transformation. The project focuses on inclusion of needs of refugees into the health and rehabilitation training and education, making higher education institutions (HEI) more accessible and inclusive of refugees, both on curricular and practical levels. Second, participating HEI use digital learning and OERs to transform the way they offer programs for practicing professionals.

The project is a partnership of higher HEI and service providers. It bridges the gap between education and practice and addresses the skills mismatch between what has been taught in university programs and what practicing rehabilitation professionals’ need to serve refugees. The project also strategically positions a network of HEIs as providers of life-long learning opportunities by improving access to evidence, and facilitating interactions between practitioners, academics, and researchers.

There is an urgency to respond to the prolonged, unprecedented global refugee crisis. In 2019 almost 80 million people were forcibly displaced due to wars, persecution, violence, and human rights violations; 85% were hosted in developing countries. Turkey hosted 3.6 million refugees from Syria, the largest number in the world, while Bangladesh hosted 909,000 Rohingya refugees. In Europe, Germany was host to 1.1 million refugees. Neither health systems nor health and rehabilitation professionals have been well prepared to deal with this still evolving crisis. Many refugees have complex health needs, both physical and mental, that are a result of a cumulative trauma experienced in their home countries, during dangerous journeys, or in the period of adjustment in their new country. These needs are often presented as a combination of complex health and wellness manifestations, including impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions and require an interprofessional response. Many refugees lack access to services and facing multiple barriers from cultural differences, differences in socio-economic status, high costs and ineligibility to local health financing schemes, discrimination, adverse living conditions, and lack of information about health rights and entitlements within local healthcare system. Refugees who are women, children, older people, and people with disabilities face multiple discrimination. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these problems. However, it is important to note that this diverse and non-homogenous group also comes with resources in terms of resilience that could be used in the healing process. To support the development of competent workforce World Health Organization is developing the Global Competency Standards for Health Workers providing services to refugees and migrants. This presents an opportunity for HEI with health professional programs to improve access to educational resources and offer lifelong learning opportunities.

Method

PREP IP project relies on transnational and transdisciplinary multi-institutional collaborative partnership. It uses interprofessional approach to capacity building while harnessing digital solutions to develop an open online course and OERs to enable rehabilitation professionals to provide accessible, inclusive, and equitable services to refugees. It builds on the results of successful Erasmus+ projects that focused on physiotherapy education and refugees (PREP) and interprofessional psychosocial interventions for refugees (InterAct).