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Today's guest blog entry is by Kathy Lim Ko, President and CEO for theAsian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum.
One of the biggest challenges we face in working to improve the health of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders is making sure that our communities receive health care services in a language they can understand. We also work to make sure that health care organizations and governments at the local, state and federal levels are aware of how culture influences how people take care of their health needs. Due to differences in nationality, ethnicity and culture, as well as immigration histories, we all have varying perspectives on health and healthy behavior.
When our nation faces a public health crisis, as it has with the H1N1 “swine flu” epidemic over the past months, it is even more important to make sure that the people in our communities receive information that they can understand to protect themselves and their families.
To prepare our communities for the H1N1 flu epidemic and other public health and national emergencies, the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum has collaborated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians and the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations to make sure information is available to our communities that is language-appropriate and takes cultural differences into account.
As part of this collaboration, we have worked to translate the APHA Get Ready campaign’s H1N1 fact sheet into 10 languages. The translated fact sheets are now available in the public health alert section of our Web site, on the Get Ready Web site, and on our partners’ Web sites. The translations are in Chinese, Chamorro, Chuukese, Japanese, Korean, Marshallese, Samoan, Thai, Tongan and Vietnamese.
We are happy to make these resources available for you to easily share with your community. We hope that they will be widely used to help people protect themselves and their loved ones from being infected with — and spreading! — H1N1 flu.
Blog editor’s note: The Get Ready H1N1 flu fact sheet is also available in English and Spanish. All 12 language versions can be downloaded from the Get Ready Web site.
When our nation faces a public health crisis, as it has with the H1N1 “swine flu” epidemic over the past months, it is even more important to make sure that the people in our communities receive information that they can understand to protect themselves and their families.
To prepare our communities for the H1N1 flu epidemic and other public health and national emergencies, the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum has collaborated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians and the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations to make sure information is available to our communities that is language-appropriate and takes cultural differences into account.
As part of this collaboration, we have worked to translate the APHA Get Ready campaign’s H1N1 fact sheet into 10 languages. The translated fact sheets are now available in the public health alert section of our Web site, on the Get Ready Web site, and on our partners’ Web sites. The translations are in Chinese, Chamorro, Chuukese, Japanese, Korean, Marshallese, Samoan, Thai, Tongan and Vietnamese.
We are happy to make these resources available for you to easily share with your community. We hope that they will be widely used to help people protect themselves and their loved ones from being infected with — and spreading! — H1N1 flu.
Blog editor’s note: The Get Ready H1N1 flu fact sheet is also available in English and Spanish. All 12 language versions can be downloaded from the Get Ready Web site.
3 comments:
I think translating the factsheet into different languages will help to get the message out to those who need it the most.
This is really great. Thanks for offering this for free. I would like to see more free fact sheets in other languages.
Novel H1N1 flu is a new influenza virus causing illness in people. This new virus was first detected in the U.S. in April 2009, and has spread to many countries around the world.
Pandemic preparedness
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