The timely use of health-care services is essential to achieve the best health outcomes. We explore barriers to health-care access among refugees from Burma through interviews with key community informants who serve their community as interpreters, health-care professionals, paraprofessionals, and/or representatives. The interviews with a convenience sampling of 11 leaders from Burmese and Karen ethnic communities revealed three stages of health-care use (i.e., before, during, and after doctor’s appointments), in which their community members encounter difficulties in accessing health-care services. Using grounded theory analysis approach, specific difficulties and cultural considerations for each stage were emerged. This study suggests that training programs for health-care providers on refugee populations’ needs, cultural expectations, attitudes, and health behaviors may ease the process for refugees during each of these three stages. Interpreters as cultural brokers have an important role in facilitating cross-cultural communications not only before and during the appointment but also after doctor’s visits, such as in the pharmacy and labs.

Although Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in the United States, research on this population continues to lag behind that on other minorities. In this article, we take factors recognized as critical elements to the physical and mental health outcomes of Asian Americans and apply the social determinants of health (SDH) framework to reconceptualize these factors as structural or intermediary factors. This study uses a nationally representative sample of Asian Americans from the National Latino and Asian American Study (N = 2,067) to examine the relationships between the SDH factors and 4 physical and mental health outcomes (chronic conditions, diagnosable mental health disorders, self-rated physical health, self-rated mental health). Negative binomial, logistic, and ordinary least squares regression analyses are modeled to estimate these associations. The results show that structural and intermediary factors are significantly associated with all 4 health outcomes. The ass...