Health mobility and support: medical evacuations of minors from Mayotte to Reunion Island (AccMinEV)

ARS Mayotte, Ilpem, MSH Paris Nord and UPCité funding (2023-2026)
Coordinator: Lynda Lotte Hoareau, Cermes3
Co-coordinator: Dolorès Pourette, Ceped

This project addresses the question of continuities and discontinuities of care, accompaniment and links (social, family and emotional) in the case of medical evacuations of minors from Mayotte to Reunion Island.
The subject of medical evacuations in the Overseas Territories of the Indian Ocean is part of a more general reflection on mobility and therapeutic circulation, and on the health and care experiences of migrant populations. In Mayotte, the complexity of patients' health care pathways can be explained as much by their precarious situation as by administrative insecurity and insufficient health care services. In this singular context, we have chosen to observe the support situation of people who are or have been evacuated from Mayotte to Reunion Island and their families - through the observation of the functioning of the EVASAN system. Our project aims to understand the effects of this context (social, geopolitical, legal and institutional) on the trajectories of minors in need of care and their relatives, as well as the effects of separation/early termination on the child and his/her family when the latter leaves alone for long-term care.
The project has two main objectives:
- To identify and describe the organization and types of support, official or spontaneous, and the actors involved: institutional actors, health professionals, family, entourage, association.
- To document the diversity of the trajectories of children and their relatives, at the interface between health situations, family configurations, inequalities of resources and administrative situations.
The chosen method is inductive and comprehensive, closely linking conceptual knowledge and ethnographic survey practices (interviews, observations).
Our research is built with a plurality of views due to our research trajectories inscribed in different disciplinary fields (anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, law) and our previous experiences of interdisciplinary dialogues. This multidisciplinarity allows us to better understand the experiences and trajectories of children and their relatives, and the modalities of their accompaniment: we thus put into dialogue anthropological approaches of therapeutic circulations, sociological works on care trajectories, health organizations and care practices, the production of inequalities in childhood, as well as works in psychology on the prevention of early bonds in a context of separation.