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Synonyms

Health of refugees; Migrant health; Refugee medicine; Refugee well-being

Definition

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or UNHCR (2021a) defines refugees as “people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country” (para. 1). As a key legal document, the 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR, n.d.) defines refugees as people who are “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (p. 3). Because of these unique conditions surrounding refugees and based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, refugee health is recognized as a fundamental human rights issue (Moreno et al., 2001; WHO, 2016). Effective refugee resettlement – “the transfer of refugees from an asylum country to another State, that has agreed to admit them and...

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Correspondence to Rukhsana Ahmed .

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Ahmed, R. (2023). Refugee Health. In: Crawford, P., Kadetz, P. (eds) Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Health Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26825-1_93-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26825-1_93-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26825-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26825-1

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Refugee Health
    Published:
    07 November 2023

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26825-1_93-2

  2. Original

    Refugee Health
    Published:
    13 June 2023

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26825-1_93-1