Background: Health promotion is a wide term and actions to promote vulnerable groups’ health and close health inequalities involve many actors in the society. Actions on structural determinants like governance and policies are of great importance. Even though there are several studies focused on immigrants and health promotion, few studies on the structural social determinants of health and newly arrived refugees exist today.
Aim: The aim is to study how health promotion is regarded through the societal structure of policy making, governing and exercise of authority from international to the local level as well as how newly arrivals themselves experienced health promotion during their time in the establishment program.
Method: The project consists of five studies. Study one is a qualitative study focused on authority officials’ view on collaboration in health promotion activities. Study two will be a document analysis, with a discourse analysis of policies related to migration, immigration, and integration. Policies from international organizations like the UN, WHO, EU, as well as the Swedish government and Swedish national authorities, will be analyzed through a discourse analysis focused on the concept of health, health promotion, and actions on social determinants of health. Study three will be a quantitative study on how politicians in councils in municipalities and regions in northern Sweden view their role, responsibility, and possibility to promote newly arrived refugees’ health. The fourth study is planned to focus on authority officials, through a registration of their reflections on health promotion activities in meetings with newly arrived refugees. Finally, the fifth study will be an interview study with refugees, who have gone through the establishment program, to study their experience of health promotion during their time as newly arrived refugees.
Contribution of the study: This research will add to the limited knowledge of how health and health promotion are regarded through the multi-level governance of a society. The result will indicate if health promotion for newly arrivals is regarded in policies and through policy- and decision-making.