Asylum seekers

tallaght01

This is another of my "there's not much point to this thread and I'm not trying to make much of a point" postings :P

The more I do kiddy A+E, the more I'm becoming saddened at how asylum seekers live.

I saw a kid yesterday. His family are seeking asylum from Darfur, in Sudan. He was about 2 years old and was genuinely unwell. He had an acute attack of wheeze, secondary to a viral upper repiratory tract infection, and needed to stay in our observation unit for about 8 hours. His parents had called an ambulance to bring him to hospital, on the advice of their GP. Sensible GP. Some small babies end up in intensive care with viral wheeze. They say the ambulance man was angry, though and told them they shouldn't be calling ambulances for minor illnesses. They apologised to me if they are wasting my time.
Then, when they were going home, their embarrassed looking dad asked me if his child could stay the night in hospital. This surprised me, as the kiddy was loking pretty well by now. So dad explained that they live about 8miles from our hospital. He gets social welfare benefits, but mostly gets paid in food vouchers. He had no cash for a taxi, just a bus pass. The buses to his part of the city don't run late at night. He told me that he and his wife would walk home, and come back in the morning when the buses were back running to collect their child. They didn't think it was wise for their sick toddler to walk 8miles. I can see their point.
I told them I would try to sort something. The ward sister knows about things like this, so I asked her how I arrange transport home for these people. She huffed and puffed, and got angry. I don't think she likes asylum seekers. She said it was impossible, as only some manager could authorise that, and he was at home. I made a stack of phone calls to a load of people who didn't want to help, when I explained the situation. Then I phoned the hospital manager guy at home, who reluctantly agreed.

The saddest bit was when the dad offered to give us the value of the taxi ride in vouchers.
I don't think we pay our asylum seekers in vouchers in Ireland. I hope we don't. It must be horrendous to feel you have no option other than to walk 8miles with your sick child straight after discharge from hospital with a respiratory infection in the developed world in 2007.

My 2nd story is shorter. Today I was seeing the child of a very pleasant lady from Nigeria. He was only 8months old, and had a high temperature because of a throat infection. I was sending him home, and was giving my usual chat about the danger signs to look for in an unwell baby. I was telling her about signs such as lethargy, drowsiness, difficulty breathing, difficulty in rousing etc. All serious signs in a baby. I asked her if she had transport. "if you have a car, just bundle her into the back and get her here as quickly as possible if she's very unwell" I said. "I don't have a car, but if she gets any of those signs, I have a bus pass that they gave me, so I'll catch the bus".

Funny in a way, but also very very sad.

InFront

I'm not sure the image of the asylum seeking father offering to pay you in vouchers suits that very particular (not universal) preferred perception of the asylum seeker as a leeching trickster, freeloading free cars and haircuts whilst simultaneously owning most of Angola.
However it's an interesting angle, one we don't hear enough of. I've had the pleasure of spending a bit of time working with asylum seekers, on a very informal basis, the reality of their existence (and it is merely an existence) is vastly different to what some people choose to believe. Would you be happy, in a hostel, on twenty euro per week? Me neither. But that's the asylum seekers allowance, that's their life week in week out. That's not any great victory on their behalf, it's not any big scam.

Anyway just on a medical note, I have a lecturer with special interest in this topic who says his biggest concern in this department is the number of asylum seekers suffering mental health problems who aren't really having their psychiatric issues adequately addressed.

oneeyedsnake

InFront wrote:

I'm not sure the image of the asylum seeking father offering to pay you in vouchers suits that very particular (not universal) preferred perception of the asylum seeker as a leeching trickster, freeloading free cars and haircuts whilst simultaneously owning most of Angola.
However it's an interesting angle, one we don't hear enough of. I've had the pleasure of spending a bit of time working with asylum seekers, on a very informal basis, the reality of their existence (and it is merely an existence) is vastly different to what some people choose to believe. Would you be happy, in a hostel, on twenty euro per week? Me neither. But that's the asylum seekers allowance, that's their life week in week out. That's not any great victory on their behalf, it's not any big scam.

Anyway just on a medical note, I have a lecturer with special interest in this topic who says his biggest concern in this department is the number of asylum seekers suffering mental health problems who aren't really having their psychiatric issues adequately addressed.

Completely off topic but...

I was wondering why do asylum seekers even bother coming to Ireland.Do they not know they are going to get a bum deal?There is a much more diverse community in the UK(where I live during the academic year),surely they would be better off in the UK if only for this reason alone.

tallaght01

I guess asylum seekers end up wherever the lorry stops, or wherever their family might already be, or wherever the people they're fleeing from don't have a strong base. I don't really know. I guess there's a myriad of reasons why people end up where they do.
Multicultural as the UK is, though, it's no beacon of tolerance. Their asylum seekers get treated every bit as badly as ours do, except perhaps in Ireland we don't pay them in food vouchers? Or do we?

Their radio phone-ins are full of the same "I'm not racist or anything but...." chat. Same rubbish, different accents.

I'm not sure I fully get Infront's comments about the vouchers. He offered to give them to the hospital after we'd aranged his taxi. He was offering them as a gesture of goodwill, or in an attempt to keep a shred of dignity by being able to pay his way in some way, to my mind anyway.

InFront

I guess it all boils down to the chance they take that their application will be accepted and they can make a new life. The reason why Ireland used to receive lots of asylum applications relative to some of its "less popular" neighbours, was in many cases down to asylum laws.
There's no doubt about it, a few years ago the asylum regulations in this country were more relaxed. This does not we were getting cheaters, it just means that people with genuine problems, in real need of asylum who might have applied to the UK or Italy for example, obviously needed to apply to somewhere they knew they would be accepted. So, for a while, Ireland was acting as a charity for what were quite usually very worthy causes.
That isn't really the case anymore, now only tiny numbers of asylum seekers are staying on here, and less are applying because the country has become quite strict with regard to the asylum process.
Just on one more point, Irish urban centres are pretty diverse places, so many non irish people wouldn't/ dont have had a problem in this regard.

InFront

tallaght01 wrote:

I'm not sure I fully get Infront's comments about the vouchers. He offered to give them to the hospital after we'd aranged his taxi. He was offering them as a gesture of goodwill, or in an attempt to keep a shred of dignity by being able to pay his way in some way, to my mind anyway.

I probably wasn't being clear:) I just meant that unfortunately the situation where he was offering vouchers to preserve his dingity is not an aspect of the character of an asylum seeker that the general punlic usually taps into, asylum seekers are often seen in a much more negative light.

From the asylum seekers I've spoken to, while all are glad to be away from whatever troubles they've left behind them; loss of dignity, poverty and desperate boredom (they can't legally work) are what they struggle with, possibly in that order.

DrIndy

On that note, the river liffey is devoid of fish now since many asylum seekers arrived, often with 3rd level degrees that were held up for years in the process and in the mean time were not allowed to work. They ended up fishing it out from sheer boredom!

Asylum seekers also bring new dimensions to healthcare in ireland which keeps us all busy, some are HIV positive, numerous ones carry TB and we see a lot more of sickle cell disease, thallasaemias and malaria which we ever did before. It sickens me that people who really need to stay in ireland to be treated properly for their chronic diseases are being deported.

littlebug

Have any you ever used (or had to use) interpreter services in working with asylum seekers? Or do you find that you get by without or do people tend to bring informal interpreters (friends or family) in with them? How does that work out? Looking back to Infronts point about mental health problems I imagine it must be incredibly difficult to talk to someone about mental health issues when there is a language barrier.

tallaght01

I agree with Drindy in that it's pretty horific when you hear of people being deported back to a country where their health needs are very unlikely to be met. The case of the autistic child being send back to Nigeria from Ireland is currently in the news. Autistic kids in some part of Africa are sent away from their communities and made to live alone in the wild, as the other residents fear they are possessed by evil spirits. Same with epileptics. But for every kid like that in the news, there's a stack who are HIV positive, or have sickle cell disease etc who nobody cares about. Having said that, it would be practically imposible to base asylum decisions on healthcare provision. About 40million people worldwide are HIV positive. Most are in developing counties, with little or no proper access to the medication they need. Sadly, we can't take 40million people in.

LIttlebug, we use interpreters all the time at my hospital. It's a variable service. Most are very good. There's the occasional poor one. The problem is having access to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week for about 100 languages. We often can't get hold of an appropriate person until the following day, so we jut plough on. It sometimes gets ridiculous in A+E, where sometimes you don't have time to wait for an interpreter to arrive. Recently, during an emergency involving a child from Pakistan who's parents hadn't a world of English, we had to run out to the waiting room and grab a family who were also pakistani to help. We brought them into the resuscitation room to help. They had a different dialect, but were able to make out the basics. It's not an ideal situation by any means.

This brings on a whole new argument about people being in this country for many years without ever learning the language, but that's a whole different kettle of fish........

wheresthebeef

tallaght01 you really should start a blog to properly compile all of your experiences. it would be an interesting read, and would keep them in the same place.

Traumadoc

I used interpreter services in Australia- they are invaluable when dealing with seriously ill patients, we dont seem to have anything close to that yet here, we probably only will once a coroner recommends it.

faceman

wheresthebeef wrote:

tallaght01 you really should start a blog to properly compile all of your experiences. it would be an interesting read, and would keep them in the same place.

Great idea, i dont work in medicene or anythin simliar but find his posts quite interesting. altho i suspect he will tell us he dont have the time.

tallaght01

It's very kind of you guys to suggest that I write a blog.

However, I'm not sure that

A) anyone would read it

and

I would ever get time to write it properly

What could, however, be a potential runner is a combined boards.ie healthcare-professional-type-people blog.

We have doctors, nurses, pharmacists and students here, and possibly a dentist or 2?

we could all add entries onto the one site. That way it would have regular entries.

There's a good blog here in the uk. It's the kiind of thing I'm talking about. It's at www.drrant.net

A group of doctors write it. Each individual doc only contributes once every so often, but it's regularly updated. Colectively they are known as "The Dr Rant team".

The dr rant team also only represents the views of doctors, but it would be good to get input from all members of the team.

Just a thought. I wouldn't have the first clue on how to get started!

Vorsprung

tallaght01 wrote:

What could, however, be a potential runner is a combined boards.ie healthcare-professional-type-people blog.

We have doctors, nurses, pharmacists and students here, and possibly a dentist or 2?

we could all add entries onto the one site. That way it would have regular entries.

That would be a great idea! I'd sign up for a bit of that! No idea how to set it up either though.

DrIndy

I'd be up for that!

should we do it?

John

Why not? Sounds like a good idea.

tallaght01

www.blogger.com seems to be a popular hosting site for some of the blogs I read.

I'll start a new thread to see who's interested.

UrbanFox

" They say the ambulance man was angry, though and told them they shouldn't be calling ambulances for minor illnesses."

That is a despicable attitude. Would the ambulance crew member be quite so mouthy if the child died from complications of the real illness that you actually dxed ?

Sounds like the ambulance man is a candidate for a kick in the coccyx.

Hopefully, this is not some sneaky new initiative to cut queues further by getting the ambulance crews to do the dxs on scene and keep the patients out of the hospitals. God, I hope the HSE don't read these boards.......

Anney

littlebug wrote:

Have any you ever used (or had to use) interpreter services in working with asylum seekers? Or do you find that you get by without or do people tend to bring informal interpreters (friends or family) in with them? How does that work out? Looking back to Infronts point about mental health problems I imagine it must be incredibly difficult to talk to someone about mental health issues when there is a language barrier.

I work in a G.P. surgery & we use translation services over the phone regularly. It's free, I put the phone on handsfree & the company have an agreement under their contract to have a translater for you within 3 mins.

Traumadoc

could you post the number or PM it to me it could be very helpful

milmo

I am not a medical professional but was on this board and your thread caught my eye.

I have lived and worked in countries in West Africa for a year and I only comment on that of which I have direct experience. My comments do not extend to asylum seekers from other parts of the world

Before my African experiences I would have held liberal attitudes similar to those expressed in the previous threads. However I am now quiet cynical and take each case on a case by case basis.

I have been to UN refugee camps. People there carry their few possessions on their heads, had no idea where Ireland was and had no concept of how to get here. These were genuine people in need of help, but had neither the money, education, knowledge or capability to come here.

I worked with many educated middle class Africans (from many nations) who had little regard for their less fortunate countrymen and were more concerned with personal status and wealth. Despite their positions in African society most wished to leave and live in Europe for economic reasons. Life at the bottom of the social ladder in Ireland was preferable financially to their affluent life at home.

An EU passport was priceless to them and this desire was driven by personal gain rather than personal safety. They were more than aware of western guilt over colonialism and slavery and had no qualms of playing the race card.

I believe the majority of African asylum seekers to Ireland are economic migrants and not refugees. In my opinion genuine refugees are suffering due to the abuse of the asylum process by economic migrants.

It is wrong to that our system takes so long to process cases and this should be changed, though verifying claims is often impossible.

I feel uncomfortable by what I perceive as a positive discrimination towards Africans in some sectors. Africans are unfairly portrayed as victims and some play on this to their own advantage. I don't think I have come across any protests or campaigns to prevent a Chinese/Eastern European/Kurd/Arab person etc from being deported. In my opinion discrimination is discrimination whether it be positive or negative.

If you truely believe in treating people equally then you must also accept that they are capable of human failings and are not beyond exploiting the weaknesses in our system.

I have no doubt that previous posts have been motivated by sincere kindness and humanity, and I genuinely respect your compassion.

However, there has been no proper open debate in Ireland on this issue. The middle ground has remained silent, and the vacuum has been filled with the ignorant extremists on both sides (not accusing anybody here!!).

Immigration has been a good thing for this country but it must be controlled and transparent if we are to really prevent racism taking hold.

I have been to Africa and seen the good and the bad. My views are based on my own personal experiences. You don't have to like them but don't dismiss them because they're not fashionable.

tallaght01

I think the fact that there are "economic migrants" in our country masquerading as aylum seekers is no reason not to show compassion towards asylum seekers.

I remember working in a hospital in South Africa, where all our asylum seeking patients were treated with utter contempt. There were a lot of illegal immigrants in SA at the time, so it was assumed all the migrants were illegals, and they were treated as such by the hospital staff.

I'm not naive enough to believe that the political climate in Nigeria, for example, is such that many many thousands of it's population need to flee from the likes of lagos in order to escape persecution or death.

But, I also relise that some asylum seekers have seen horrors that we can only begin to imagine.