Grant: Operating Grant

Half of all births in Montreal are to international migrant women and migrant women are responsible for over one-fifth of all Canadian births. Some migrant women are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes associated with giving birth, while being less likely to experience others. These risks are often not explained by biomedical factors and so, the role of care provided to migrant women during pregnancy, labour, birth, and afterwards comes into question. The international community has identified migrant health and care provision as a priority. Hence, we seek to know to what extent migrant-sensitive maternity care (for example, communication facilitation) is currently being provided to international migrant women who arrived in Canada less than 5 years ago and are giving birth in Montreal. We would also like to identify which factors facilitate or impinge this care from being given and further, what about this care has the greatest impact on unplanned caesarean births. We will carry out three studies within this project in the four hospitals in Montreal with the greatest number of births to international migrant women with non-English or French (i.e., 'allophone') maternal languages. First, all allophone women in Canada < 5 years, and from non-Western countries (about 2400) will be recruited in the order they give birth, their health records reviewed, and they will be asked questions about the maternity care they received and their perceptions of that care. Second, we will interview hospital staff, review policies and procedures, and observe how things function in each hospital. Third, a sub-group of women from the first study who had a caesarean birth during labour will be compared to women who had vaginal births. The results of this project will be used to improve maternity care provided to migrant women in Montreal, and elsewhere, through our partnerships with health professional associations.