Assessing a new model of community health for refugees

Rebecca Gokiert

Refugees who arrive in Canada often have serious health needs but face significant barriers to accessing care. A community health centre in Edmonton is using a new model to deliver care to government-assisted refugees — and learning along the way how best to do so. 

To ensure the greatest impact, the New Canadians Health Centre has partnered with the Evaluation Capacity Network (ECN), led by Rebecca Gokiert, professor in the School of Public Health, to document and evaluate the centre’s evolution. 

“It’s a new model; what are we learning?” says Gokiert, an expert in community-based participatory research and evaluation. 

“How can we use those learnings immediately to shift not only clinical practice but also how these organizations structure themselves, what kind of staffing they need to best meet the needs of their patients? We can mobilize the learnings to improve care.” 

The NCHC offers clinical care to all government-assisted refugees who settle in Edmonton, along with support in navigating health and social services. It brings together family physicians, specialists, including pediatricians, an internal medicine specialist, a psychiatrist, nurses and a health navigator under one roof to support refugees, with phone-based language interpretation available at every appointment. 

NCHC goes beyond health care delivery, embodying a holistic model of refugee health grounded in the principles supporting social justice, equity and inclusion. 

Since it opened its doors in 2021, the NCHC has provided services to more than 2,900 patients, from babies to seniors, with almost half being children. Patients access the centre for up to two years, until they are transferred to a primary care provider in the community, in order to maintain capacity for new arrivals. 

The partnership between the ECN and the NCHC has helped to build the research and evaluation infrastructure needed to explore how well the principles-based model of care is meeting the needs of its patients. The ECN’s approach is unique because it involves community members directly, from refugee health and settlement leaders to refugees with lived experience, helping shape research that is culturally sensitive and reflects their needs. 

Another distinctive aspect of the research is building tools to study patient data in the electronic medical record system, and exploring ways to link it with provincial datasets to better track refugee health needs over time. The partnership has also allowed graduate students to undertake research on key priority areas for the centre, such as studies of maternal health, pediatric research from birth to age five and refugees’ transitions from the centre to a permanent primary care provider. 

Funding to date is from the U of A’s Strategic Research Initiatives Fund, the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute and Mitacs Accelerate Fellowships. 

“We know that refugees come with significant health needs and traumas. We know that they can face barriers to accessing health care. And we know if they don’t get that access, their health outcomes are going to worsen,” says Gokiert, adding this has long-term costs to newcomers and to society, both human and economic. 

“This study is contributing to the conversation about the best way to support refugees in accessing health care,” she says, pointing to the timely sharing of research findings with the NCHC team and other community partners, alongside publications in open-access journals and presentations at national and international refugee health conferences, including a recent publication about the NCHC’s model. These efforts ensure practitioners and community organizations can use the evidence to inform their work. 

“We want to share our findings with community-based health clinics across Canada, with the hope of offering timely, robust information that could improve access and funding.”

Learn more about the important research happening in the School of Public Health in the 2024-25 Research Impact Report »