Understanding the health needs of church-going immigrants: Opportunities for promoting health

Introduction: Church attendance has been associated with lower mortality and lower morbidity, especially for chronic diseases. Religious institutions play important roles for new immigrants in several ways and can impact their health. While there have been interventions studied for individual communities, however, there is a paucity of evidence related to health needs of different immigrant groups that attend church, on a national level.

Objectives: This study sought to assess health outcomes for Christian church-going U.S. immigrants, comparing immigrant groups and denominations.

Methods: Immigrants who self-identify as Christians were surveyed as part of a randomized survey of newly legalized immigrants using the New Immigrant Survey public use data set. Analysis was performed using measures of religious involvement as well as extensive immigrant and other demographic variables. Outcome measures included health status, disease incidence, access to care, and health behaviors.

Results: Almost 3000 church-going immigrants participated in the survey, representing a wide range of health, religious, and demographic measures, including populations from 29 countries. There was much variation in needs with differences by religious and ethnic dimensions for a wide range of health-related measures such as lifestyle, chronic disease burden and overall changes in health status.

Conclusion: An opportunity exists to leverage widespread church-going by immigrants to create innovative and effective interventions. Efforts to target the needs of immigrant populations in faith communities and take their varying characteristics into account are important to successful systematic interventions. Using this information can be of great value in health promotion initiatives for church-going populations nationally.