Search results
Study participants were recruited from eight Filipino community-based organizations in the region. Information about demographic and acculturative characteristics, health behaviors, self-reported chronic health conditions, and chronic disease perception were collected.
- Aisha Bhimla, Lauren Yap, Minsun Lee, Brenda Seals, Hermie Aczon, Grace X. Ma
- 10.1007/s10900-016-0252-0
- 2017
- 2017/04
- Overview
- A lack of data as 'a form of structural inequality' and how to solve it
- Surveying cultural barriers and sentiment on vaccines
Throughout the pandemic, Roy "RJ" Taggueg saw how much care and effort Filipino American nurses poured into their jobs.
"You can tell just the ways in which they talk about their work -- they love their work, they love their patients, they love that the work that they're doing saves lives," said Taggueg, director of research at the UC Davis Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies.
He saw them do their jobs with a work ethic Filipinos are often commended for -- for being masipag, or hardworking, he said.
Traits like that — along with the ability to easily assimilate — receive praise and are often a source of pride for Filipino, Taggueg said. Yet they’re ones that can make them exploitable in work environments and ones that can be traced back to the Philippines' colonial past. It’s a history Taggueg credits a contributor to the disparities that raised the risk of Covid-19's impact on Filipino Americans. Other community leaders and advocates say structural factors, particularly the lack of disaggregated data, are another culprit.
The exact Covid impact on the community is unknown because death data on Asian American subgroups is lumped into a single category. But they were likely at greater risk of getting sick, being hospitalized or even dying from Covid-19 due to a number of factors, including their high representation among health care workers, higher rates of underlying health conditions and a high share living in multigenerational households.
EJ Ramos David, a professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, whose research focuses on the impact of colonial mentality on Filipino Americans, noted that one aspect of that mentality is colonial debt -- a tendency to tolerate, accept or minimize experiences of injustice.
Taggueg said Covid-19 exacerbated existing problems among Filipino Americans that were overlooked. Among those include the risk nurses face on the job and the mental health impact of household dynamics on college students.
He incorporated Covid-19-related questions into a nationwide survey — one of the first on Filipino Americans that has been conducted since the Filipino American Community Epidemiological Study in the 1990s. He said the Filipinx Count Survey, which is slated for publication in July, was originally carried out so that there would be a database about and for Filipino Americans by the community.
“Because of the fact that we weren't being covered by researchers — at least quantitative ones very specifically — for a database, we needed to create that,” Taggueg said.
Survey findings included that the vast majority of respondents who reported mental health symptoms attributed them to Covid-19, approximately one-third were essential workers, and students faced unique challenges of adjusting to remote learning when they had to move back home and were removed from their social support systems.
Collecting disaggregated data to fill in missing gaps on Filipino American data is one area that advocates like Taggueg have invested efforts into.
“And then how do we further develop that argument that refusal of data collection systems to report disaggregated data is, in fact, a form of violence or a form of structural inequality that allows disparities to persist?” said Carlos Oronce, president-elect of the Filipinx Community Health Association. “It shouldn't be thought of as more of a passive thing and more of an action that systems do to prevent the addressing of disparities.”
Throughout the summer, Dr. Melissa Palma hopes to collect 500 responses to a survey she’s designing on vaccine attitudes.
It’s research that Palma, a preventive medicine, public health and family medicine resident at Cook County Health in Chicago, is spearheading as part of the non-profit Filipino Young Leaders Program’s Covid-19 Task Force initiatives. Researchers aim to show through the survey how vaccinations have rolled out in the Filipino American community, what proportion of the community has received the vaccine, if the elderly were able to receive it as soon as it was available to them, and what barriers may have caused delays.
She added that they’re also looking to uncover aspects of Filipino culture that might make people less likely to seek out care, and explore a potential link to vaccination attitudes in the Philippines. She noted that dropping immunization rates in the Philippines led to one of the biggest measles outbreaks there in 2019.
“Filipino Americans don't just exist in the United States,” she said. “We exist in community and in relationship with our families from back home.”
Taggueg said all the efforts that have emerged in response to the toll of Covid-19 on Filipino Americans are helpful to problems they face. He also said that the problems are symptoms of larger core issues in which disparities in the community are rooted.
“The fact of the matter is, our current systems are not prepared to have handled the things that we had gone through. Not just as a community, but as a society,” he said.
- Agnes Constante
May 30, 2021 · After the U.S. colonized the Philippines in the late 19th century, the country has relied on Filipino health care workers to mend the staffing gaps in America’s patchwork health care system,...
From this, health care providers can develop and implement culturally tailored, evidence-based interventions that will not only effectively treat individual Asian patients but also build trust among the Asian community in a health care system that has seemed to ignore its health care needs.
We invite all Filipino-Americans in the five states to join the FAPCOR nayons and give voice to their healthcare issues. Our network comprises of Academic Research Collaborators (ARC) and Patient Advocate Leaders (PAL).
Cultivating cultural sensitivity in health care providers can buffer the psychological toll and emotional consequences of negative health care encounters for historically marginalized communities (Flynn et al., 2020), including Filipinos.
People also ask
What percentage of health care workers are Filipino?
Are health disparities hidden in Filipino Americans?
Do Filipino Americans have a higher mental health problem than Asian Americans?
Do Filipino Americans have a health needs assessment?
To learn about the uniqueness of Filipinos/Filipino American experience (in the United States) To become familiar with cultural beliefs and values as it relates to health, wellness and help-seeking behavior. To learn culturally responsive approaches in working with Filipinos/Filipino American clients and families.
