Addressing the Newborn Health Response in Colombia: Venezuelan refugees and migrants in Colombia

Introduction: For the past decade, Venezuela has suffered from political and economic crises that have led to a deterioration of its health system, including medicine shortages, lack of water and electricity, and emigration of health personnel, resulting in worsening health outcomes and a large outflow of people to neighboring countries. Between 2015 and February 2022, approximately 7.2 million Venezuelans fled their country, with Colombia hosting a total of 2.5 millions of those, the majority of whom are women and girls.
Objectives: To identify facilitators and barriers to newborn health policy, strategy, and action plan implementation for the Venezuelan refugee and migrant populations in Colombia. In addition, to generate recommendations on how to adapt advocacy, resource allocation and technical assistance to accelerate progress towards ENAP (Every Newborn Action Plan) targets.
Methods: A thematic review of recent grey and academic literature regarding key themes, questions, tensions, and emerging lessons associated with Colombia and the newborn health response was conducted. Informed by the literature review, a qualitative case study approach was then utilized. This included 10 Key-informant interviews (KIIs) conducted in 2020 with healthcare providers and professional associations, humanitarian and healthcare-implementing partners, and government and local authorities in Colombia. Interviews were conducted virtually in Spanish and translated and transcribed to English for a thematic analysis.
Results: Key findings highlighted that the Colombian government and its public health and healthcare professionals have prioritized access to care for Venezuelan mothers and newborns, as evidenced by their policies, services, and personal commitments to this population. Despite many challenges, Colombia’s government, with support from multilateral agencies and NGOs, has largely directly attended mothers and newborns, as well as absorbed other vulnerable populations into their health system. Due to the complexity of the crises, several multilateral agencies have provided Ministry of National Health services nationwide. Utilizing humanitarian coordination platforms, the agencies have encouraged effective communication and collaboration between researchers, development professionals, and humanitarian actors.
Conclusions: Our study suggests that while Colombia has a robust policy framework in place, the Colombian government should continue to strengthen its alignment of national and sub national health policies and provide opportunities for information to flow between national and sub national policymakers to improve access and quality of services to this migrant population, ensure health providers have resources needed to implement policy, and reduce health disparities. Greater funding offers the government the ability to strengthen its commitment to the newborn response. Recognizing and incorporating regional as well as cultural differences into the newborn health care response will be key to further progress. It is important that the Colombian government makes a registry of vital records more publicly available and share findings from data with healthcare stakeholders and community partners. It is also critical that stakeholders continue to educate and communicate health access and service information to refugee and migrant populations, ideally en route or upon arrival in Colombia.