Health information for Multicultural Communities

ALIA Multicultural hosted the Health information for Multicultural Communities webinar on August 25th.

With more than 7 million people reporting that they were born overseas in the 2021 Census and 5.8 million people using a language other than English at home this was a timely event. Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia (FECCA) dedicated their 56th issue of Mosaic Matters to Multicultural Health Matters with topics ranging from the Covid-19 health response, Mental Health, Reproductive health, inclusive health service, HIV, Health literacy, Digital Health, Community connectedness and more.

The Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health is a community-based, not-for-profit organisation led by, for and with women from migrant and refugee backgrounds. This service provides access to resources and information that are difficult to locate or access by other services and caters for migrant, refugee and international students.

This webinar explored the importance of health information and programs catering to culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Facilitated by Dr. Bhuva Narayan, Associate Professor of Digital Social Media at the School of Communication and Director of the PhD programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney (UTS), we hear from Gayathri (Gaya) Dharmagesan from the NSW Multicultural Health Communication Service (MHCS) speak about some of the services provided and some useful guidelines when working with Multicultural communities. This is followed by a presentation about The Memory Room Project from Kay Pisel Library Customer Service Team Leader – Home Lib Service with City of Newcastle Creative & Community Services with questions on how such a program can benefit communities from culturally and linguistically diverse communities.