Quality of Elderly Vietnamese Immigrant Healthcare In the Bay Area

Elderly Vietnamese immigrants experience unique stressors and healthcare incompatibilities that demand an examination of the quality of their physician-patient interactions.Previous studies on Vietnamese American health disparities demonstrate concerns over stroke rates, heart disease, and reluctance to communicate with health providers.Particular structural, political, cultural, and behavioral effects resulting from forcible immigration from the Vietnam War and communism have exacerbated healthcare complications.To study the depth of these effects, I surveyed and interviewed Vietnamese individuals sixty years of age or older who immigrated to America.These surveys and interviews allowed participants to rate their primary care physicians on different metrics to demonstrate their level of satisfaction with their patient-physician interactions holistically and to connect these ratings to their personal levels of integration within American society and ability to navigate American healthcare systems.The results surprisingly demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive response towards American healthcare,highlighting not the challenges that Vietnamese elderly face in regards to achieving satisfactory levels of healthcare, but rather the means through which they have overcome the difficulties of acculturation and gained access to quality healthcare.My findings indicate success stories in traversing the difficult realm of healthcare for these Vietnamese elderly individuals, whether through their education and information seeking or through caretakers who are capable of providing for them and provide insight into how we can extend this success to others still struggling to find quality healthcare.To expand upon these findings, I suggest conducting similar surveys and interviews, but with a larger sample of Vietnamese Americans, including diversity in education, income, class, employment, and family/home life, as this study was most limited by its small and non-diverse sample.