Introduction
Migrants in encampments at the US-Mexico border face significant health challenges while awaiting asylum. Despite major refugee health needs globally, there is a shortage of health professionals providing humanitarian aid to migrants. To understand how to better motivate humanitarian work participation, we aimed to characterize factors influencing health professionals’ motivations and barriers to working with migrants.
Methods
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 health professionals from four humanitarian non-governmental organizations providing care for migrants in non-permanent encampments at the US-Mexico border. Interviews were conducted in Matamoros and Reynosa, Mexico in 2020 and 2023, respectively. Topics covered motivations, facilitators, barriers, benefits, and challenges to humanitarian work and recommendations to increase interest. Interviews were analyzed in Nvivo14 using a validated codebook and team-based coding methodology.
Results
The health workers interviewed were mainly female (70%), had a median age of 32, and were from the US (59%), Mexico (22%), Cuba (11%), Peru (4%), and Nicaragua (4%). Participants’ professions included nurses (42%), physicians (30%), logisticians (11%), social workers (7%), an EMT (4%), and a pharmacist (4%). Health workers were motivated by a desire to help vulnerable populations (78%), prior positive experiences in humanitarian work (59%), and the need to act after witnessing human suffering (56%). Facilitating factors included geographic proximity (33%), employer flexibility (30%), and logistical support (26%), while barriers included career (44%) and family (41%) commitments, safety risks (41%), emotional difficulties (33%), and limited education (44%) and volunteer opportunities (37%). Participants noted benefits of working with migrants, such as improved clinical skills (63%), sociocultural learning (63%), and a sense of purpose (58%). Participants suggested enhancing recruitment by addressing barriers to humanitarian work, earlier integration of humanitarian training into medical education, collaboration between medical institutions and humanitarian organizations, and more robust recruitment and encouragement among colleagues.
Conclusions
Health professionals working with migrants at the US-Mexico border shared common determinants to providing humanitarian health aid. We amplify humanitarian workers’ experiences to identify key facilitators, barriers, challenges, and recommendations to enhance future recruitment efforts. Our findings can be used to address humanitarian and migrant health workforce shortages.