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Building Social Capital Through a Peer-Led Community Health Workshop: A Pilot with the Bhutanese Refugee Community

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Abstract

Despite the high health and mental health care needs, resettled refugees often face cultural and linguistic challenges that hinder the access to appropriate and timely interventions and services. Additionally, such concepts as preventive health or mental health treatment are foreign to this population, which creates additional burdens to the refugee community that already have difficulty navigating a complex health care system in the U.S. To address multiple and complex gaps in health and mental health support for the refugee community, requested is an innovative approach that can convey culturally responsive and effective interventions for health promotion, such as peer-based health education. Few studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of peer-led community health interventions with refugee populations in the U.S. resettlement context. However, peer-led interventions have been shown to be effective when working with cultural minorities and interventions in an international context. Adopting a social capital framework, the current study conducted qualitative evaluation on the impact of a pilot peer-led community health workshop (CHW) in the Bhutanese refugee community. A hybrid thematic analysis of focus group discussion data revealed the improvement in health promotion outcomes and health practice, as well as perceived emotional health. The results also showed that the peer-led CHW provided a platform of community building and participation, while increasing a sense of community, sense of belonging and unity. The findings posit that a peer-led intervention model provides culturally responsive and effective tools for building social capital and promoting community health in the refugee community.

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Acknowledgments

The current study was possible thanks to the funding support from the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) Office of Cultural and Linguistic Competence (OCLC). Also, we are indebted to the healing partnership network, the Greater Richmond Refugee Mental Health Council (GRRMHC) and the devoted refugee community leaders of the Bhutanese Community of the Greater Richmond (BCGR). We would like to thank all the participants who joined the project and shared their valuable opinions with the research team.

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  1. School of Social Work, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1000 Floyd Ave. Academic Learning Commons Rm# 3207, Richmond, VA, 23284, USA

    Hyojin Im & Rachel Rosenberg

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  1. Hyojin Im
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  2. Rachel Rosenberg
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Correspondence to Hyojin Im.

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Im, H., Rosenberg, R. Building Social Capital Through a Peer-Led Community Health Workshop: A Pilot with the Bhutanese Refugee Community. J Community Health 41, 509–517 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-015-0124-z

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