New and Innovative Approaches to Communicating Health Messages

The 5th Multilingual Health Information Stakeholders Forum held on 30 September 2015 has resulted to positive outcomes for health workers working with multicultural communities.

The theme of the forum was ‘Developing new and innovative approaches to engaging and communicating health messages for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities’.

“Leading from the edge brings us into contact with a wider range of relationships, and in turn, this increases our potential for diversity in terms of thought, experience and background. Diversity leads to more disruptive thinking, faster change and better outcomes.”

Aylet Baron

How do we develop new and innovative approaches to engaging and communicating health messages for CALD communities?

• First - acknowledge that “CALD” as a term, may lump people in one group and this can be problematic.  
• Second - see health consumer engagement as a continuum from health translation flyers on one end to working with communities in jointly developing solutions on the other end.
• Third - get working with as many different cultural groups, health consumers, professional backgrounds, encouraging communities of practice – to produce new ideas and approaches to the same problems.

These three messages were among those that were echoed by 85 interested participants at the forum. Expert speakers and case studies were also presented.

As a result three key areas of action were identified:

• Collaboration of diverse groups to produce innovation and engagement
• Seeing diversity as an asset. The diversities of languages and cultures have traditionally been seen as “barriers” and not enablers
• Capacity building

For a full report visit: http://www.mhcs.health.nsw.gov.au/media-centre/forum-5

RECOMMENDATIONS

Inspired by the presenters and plenary discussions, stakeholders at the forum identified three priorities for the next two years:

1.       Collaboration of diverse groups to produce innovation and engagement

Participants at the forum agreed that opportunities for collaboration need to be established across various stakeholders (e.g. Health, CALD communities, etc.).

• Health Consumers NSW to investigate strategies to work with Multicultural Health services, specific cultural groups e.g. emerging communities to enhance engagement with CALD consumers.

•  The need to provide more opportunities for bilingual health workers to network and form coalitions

2.       Seeing diversity as an asset. The diversities of languages and cultures have traditionally been seen as “barriers” and not enablers.

The forum participants agreed that NSW services need to maximise opportunities that linguistic and cultural diversity of Health and community organisations to contribute to health and social marketing campaigns.

• MHCS to investigate strategies to identify bilingual speakers who are health experts or community champions/leaders with the view of linking them to language-specific media.

3.       Capacity building

Participants at the forum identified the following groups that needs capacity building:

• Bilingual health workers, health experts and community champions for specific health issues to be trained in providing media interviews

•  Media, Communication, Campaign development officers to be offered cultural competency, multicultural media training and CALD community engagement
  

• CALD community leaders and champions who are interested in improving the health of their communities to be offered opportunities to develop health literacy skills to better navigate the health system.