The New South Wales Multicultural Health Communication Service (MHCS) is holding a forum on August 14 which will consider how governmental and non- governmental organisations can develop, implement and evaluate multilingual health campaigns. The campaign targets culturally and linguistically diverse communities in order to boost coordination, development and dissemination of health information.

The forum’s facilitator Michael Camit, who is the marketing and communication manager at MHCS said that lessons from past forums have helped the organisation build toward this one.

“In the past we used to … and we have learnt from our mistakes … but we used to have advisory committees representing different migrant organisations, some well established, some not so well established health services, state-wide services, and not everyone was interested in the same topic,” he told Neos Kosmos.

“So we saw that attendances in those working groups were not consistent. This time because it’s targeted (to different ethnic groups) and we have explicitly stated what the agenda is about we find that there’s a rise in attendance.”

He said that this forum is an opportunity for ethnically and linguistically diverse communities to be better provided with health information.

“At the moment our website discusses 500 publications in up to 65 languages and it’s freely available. But we want to make sure that all the information is relevant.”

Greek is one of the 65 languages Mr Camit mentions.

“As a state-wide service, from time to time we get requests from individuals and organisations saying ‘why don’t you have this topic in this particular language?’. So we want to make sure that it’s not just the people that speak the loudest that get that information.

“This forum is specifically for government and non-government organisations who want to reach out to migrant communities and with the speed of information now we want to look at things like online media – ‘can we do it better?’.”

If you would like further information on the forum visit www.mhcs.health.nsw.gov.au/media-centre/stakeholders-forum