This Topic Summary synthesizes Program Results on completed RWJF-supported projects that focused on immigrants to the United States. These projects used a variety of approaches and strategies, but share the common theme of attempting to assess and improve immigrants’ access to high-quality health care services. Some address the issue of immigrants’ health care needs on a national scale, while others look at the needs of immigrants in a single community.

These projects do not reflect the current strategy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in addressing the needs of immigrants.

The Vulnerable Populations team supports promising new ideas that address health and health care problems that intersect with social factors—housing, poverty and inadequate education—and affect society’s most vulnerable people, including low-income children and their families, frail older adults, adults with disabilities, the homeless, those with HIV/AIDS, immigrants and refugees, and those with severe mental illness.

Active grants funded under this strategy are not covered in this report, but are listed in the Appendix. As Program Results are written on them, this report will be updated.

Completed RWJF-supported projects focused on immigrants fell into the following four categories:

• Immigrant Health Status, Access to Care and Quality of Care—Immigrants are less likely to have adequate insurance coverage and access to health care, according to three RWJF-supported studies. Immigrants face challenges to receiving care, including fear of government officials, language barriers and transportation difficulties. Efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from receiving government-funded health benefits are not likely to reduce the level of immigration, according to this research.
• Community-Based Health Outreach— RWJF supported several projects that trained local residents to reach into their communities, bringing culturally sensitive health information to immigrants in their own language. These projects educated immigrants about health topics, helped them navigate the health care system and sometimes provided basic health care services such as screening for chronic illness. Community-based health outreach helps reduce sociocultural barriers to care and can benefit health care providers, who gain loyal consumers.
• Direct Health Services for Immigrants—In addition to the community-based health outreach services, RWJF supported a number of other projects that provided direct health care services to needy immigrants.
• Medical Interpretation and Translation Services—These projects aimed to improve communication between English-speaking health care providers and non-English-speaking patients in order to improve care.

This report directs readers to Program Results on those topics. Program Results include further details of the projects, as well as full bibliographies of literature produced from these projects.