Health visits in the child health and school health care services with children of foreign origin

Nurses experience worries of overlooking children’s risks of ill-health in encounters when the nurse and the child don’t share ethnicity, culture or language. Encounters such as health visits are complex, which might inflict on the child’s participation in the health visit. The research project investigates school and child health care nurses’ cultural competence and clinical practice when promoting participation for children of foreign origin as well as how children of foreign origin experience and participate in health visits. The results will be used to develop an intervention to strengthen nurses’ clinical practices in health visits with children of foreign origin.

Nurses’ cultural competence and clinical practice to promote participation has been assessed using a national web-based survey. To investigate how adolescents of foreign origin experience health visits in the school health care services focus groups will be used. The video-observations of health visits is expected to provide additional knowledge about how school nurses use cultural competence and promote participation for children of foreign origin.