Digital Othering in Healthcare: First-Generation Migrant Women from Türkiye and Unequal Access in Germany

Abstract Digital healthcare is often presented as expanding access, efficiency, and patient autonomy. Drawing on 27 semistructured interviews with first-generation migrant women from Türkiye aged 57–71 in Hamburg, Berlin, and the Ruhr region, this article examines how these women navigate digital healthcare after at least 35 years of residence in Germany. Participants often used smartphones and social media confidently, yet appointment platforms and digital communication required formal German, administrative knowledge, and familiarity with distinctions between statutory, private, and self-paying care. Access remained formally available but often became workable only through adult children and Turkish-language intermediaries. The article develops digital othering to describe how healthcare systems normalize a narrow model of the competent user and transfer the work of adaptation to those who do not fit it. Relational information precarity captures how appointments and institutional information become actionable through others, while digital sacrifice identifies the loss of oversight that can follow when mediation becomes necessary. The findings show how digitalization can weaken practical knowledge accumulated through decades of engagement with German institutions, making healthcare access newly dependent on linguistic, administrative, and family resources that the system does not consistently provide.