Health-related quality of life of migrant workers: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Background: Currently, the number of migrant workers residing in Korea is continuously increasing, which is exacerbating the workforce shortage in its society. Migrant workers experience health problems or stress due to rapid environmental changes, consequently impairing their quality of life (QoL). Accordingly, this literature review aimed to prepare basic data by identifying factors related to the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of migrant workers in Korea.

Method: In total, the literature search used seven databases to find all documents corresponding to related subject words until June 7, 2022, including PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Regional Information Sharing Systems, Korean Medical database, Science ON, and DataBase Periodical Information Academic. Furthermore, this study used the Cochrane Library and Google Scholar to manually search, to include comprehensive literature. Moreover, both English and Korean were used to search for the main terms.

Results: In total, nine articles were selected. The World Health Organization Quality of Life Brief Version tool was used in six studies to measure HRQoL. Factors affecting the HRQoL of domestic migrant workers included general characteristics such as monthly income and residence period, physical and psychological health-related characteristics such as health promotion behaviour, medical service satisfaction, and depression, and social factors such as social support and cultural adaptation stress. Social support was an important variable affecting the QoL. Particularly, increased social support improved health-related QoL. In addition, higher medical service satisfaction and lower cultural adaptation stress increased HRQoL.

Conclusions: Social factors such as social support and cultural adaptation stress affect the HRQoL of migrant workers. Therefore, the social integration program should be expanded to ensure that migrant workers can adapt to the domestic culture at an early stage. In addition, people require active support to improve the QoL in Korea through activities such as self-help groups to help them cope with stressful situations and experience positive emotions. Moreover, it is necessary to provide information on domestic medical services as well as support for medical information for self-health management to improve the quality of medical services for migrant workers.

Keywords: Health-related quality of life; Healthcare; Migrant workers; Systematic literature.

Fig. 1

The study selection process using PRISMA 2020 Abbreviations: PRISMA = Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis; CINAHL = Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature; RISS = Research Information Sharing Service; Kmbase = Korean Medical database; Dbpia = DataBase Periodical Information Academic; QoL = Quality of Life