by Jessica Lopes, Beatriz Padilla, Simone Castellani and Vera Rodrigues (UPWEB)

Project UPWEB explores the multiple approaches that residents living in superdiverse neighbourhoods use to meet their health needs, encompassing the perspectives of service users and providers based on innovative techniques conducted in two superdiverse neighbourhoods in each of these cities: Birmingham (UK), Bremen (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal) and Uppsala (Sweden).

In the recently published WSF Working Paper, the Portuguese team uses its national results to identify the challenges of provision in the context of superdiverse neighbourhoods and the different approaches to service delivery. The article shows that besides of the differences between the two selected neighbourhoods, the providers commonly agreed on four main challenges: the lack of resources in the NHS, the language barrier, the insufficient health literacy of the users and the unclear access conditions.

In the case of Portugal, the project found that the approaches adopted by the providers and their ability to bricolage depends on several factors. Some are relational and positional such as interpersonal skills, empathy capacity and commitment to serving; others are organizationally dependent in the sense that the type and extent of services provided are contingent of the entity where they work as there is a limit on the type of provision they can aim for. Another is the possibility to create networking capacity and collaboration to give sustainability to some viable solutions.