Migrant worker health equity: transforming health interventions for migrant workers

The impact of precarious work and labour exploitation on the health of migrant workers – the largest migrant group globally – is an extraordinarily neglected area of global research, measurement, and intervention development.

Jointly, our Consortium’s work has shown migrant workers experience high rates of labour exploitation, workplace injuries, mental and physical health problems, and increasing health inequalities, yet measurement tools and interventions to protect workers remain relatively absent.

Building on our systematic reviews, multi-country studies and conceptual frameworks on migrant worker health, and long-standing partnerships with stakeholders (multi-disciplinary academics from life, health, and social sciences, UN Agencies, NGOs) and, importantly, with migrant workers themselves, we will develop measurement indicators and new data-collection modules to improve evidence on migrant workers’ risk exposures and outcomes and embed them into existing global measurement surveys.

We will co-develop worker-centred health intervention prototypes with migrant workers, drawing on the expertise of our transdisciplinary team (eg, health outreach models, telehealth, heat stress protocols, and health education) available open access via our global repository.

We will develop and test a transdisciplinary data-to-action platform that will catalyse intervention development and coordinated action on the health burden of exploitative work.