ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE SERVICES AMONG SYRIAN REFUGEES IN TURKEY

Year 2022, , 530 - 551, 22.03.2022

Ilhan Can Ozen , Berna Tuncay Alpanda

https://doi.org/10.11611/yead.1066436

Abstract

The Syrian population influx has dislocated a significant number of people (6.7 million of people outside the Syrian borders, 6.5 million of people among the different provinces of Syria). The biggest group among this moving population between borders has integrated into the Turkish society, and economy. From the macro and micro perspectives, the health system integration is significantly graded by the Syrian population. We will focus on the early age group, among the refugees, as their health vulnerabilities, and health improvements will create much larger effects throughout their lifetime. What we aim in this paper is to bring forward an objective micro-level outcome that will allow us to measure two things that was crucial in the life cycle of the refugee population: the war effect which will create a push factor for them to start moving, and an integration effect which will measure the time-continuous, and time-discrete increase in their health outcomes, as a result of relatively cost-free integration into a more developed health system. The Demographic Health Survey (DHS) 2018 data that we utilize gives us an empirical advantage for identification for two reasons; it differentiates the health outcome of children, in multi-child families depending on where they were born, which we will call an intra-Syrian effect, and it allows us to compare the situation of the Syrian children vis-a-vis the average child health outcomes in the society they are integrating into (what we call the inter-Syrian effect). The results suggest that Syrians remain underneath the Turkish average, for many early child development, and vital health access, however, after integration significant positive developments occur, in terms of compensating for the negative war effect, and in terms of the second effect (integration/adaptation effect) that they have started to converge to the Turkish average, as they have spent more years in Turkey.

Keywords

Forced migration, refugees, health care system, health care demand, health care Access, health resilience, child mortality, antenatal care, postnatal care

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