Specialist homelessness services say domestic violence is the main reason for women who are refugees in Australia seeking their help.
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An Australian Institute of Health Welfare report on Friday found that one in eight humanitarian entrants (male and female) received support from specialist housing services, compared to one in 50 from the permanent migrant population.
Of the humanitarian refugees seeking help, three in five were women.
Domestic violence was the main reason (17.8 per cent of the time) that led to housing vulnerability.
The institute also looked at hospital records of refugees because their health outcomes "can be severely impacted by their experiences and health challenges prior to arriving in Australia."
"They are a subset of a group of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, who have been identified as a population of interest across the health sector."
Refugees were almost twice as likely to be hospitalised or attend an emergency department as other permanent migrants over a five-year period (2016-2021).
Falls, contact with objects and transport accidents were the three most common reasons for going to the hospital.
But the report also found that humanitarian entrants were being admitted for injuries caused by assault at greater rates (more than six times higher) than other permanent migrants.
"Additional detail on the demographics and locations of assault related injury hospitalisations is beyond the scope of these analyses and further investigations in this area would be valuable," the institute said.
The data for homelessness and hospital access was collected over a 10-year period (2011-2021).
There are over 210,000 refugees in Australia who have arrived in the last two decades.
Overall they are younger (31.8) on average compared to the general population born in Australia (39.3) and other permanent migrants (37.4), according to the latest census in 2021.
Australian Associated Press
