As a federally qualified community health center, the applicant has as its core function to provide primary healthcare services to vulnerable populations. Access to health information is a basic healthcare need. The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a free on-line multilingual multimedia digital library of health information. The focus of the work in this project is to build upon existing high quality multilingual written resources that have already been developed and put on-line by the NSW (New South Wales) Multicultural Health Communication Service (MHCS) of Australia. The project work will include the development of a community committee to identify the MHCS written materials that deal with topics and languages that are most critical to meet the health information needs of new refugees in the community. A development team will work with the local partners, MHCS and members of the target refugee community to create web-based multimedia versions of this written material. A minimum of four written documents will be developed into at least four languages for a total of at least sixteen individual multimedia software files. These will be created using Macromedia multimedia software. A website will be created that will link with the community health information website (Healthy Communities Without Borders - www.hcwb.org ) to assist end users in accessing the materials. Training for key staff at the performance sites will be provided to ensure that there is a clear awareness of the new materials and an understanding of how to access other quality multilingual on-line health information. Since this project is a key step to understanding how information technology can be better used to meet the health information needs of non-English speaking community members, a strong emphasis will be placed on evaluation activities. The evaluation will include an assessment of target users engagement in the software and whether any knowledge, skills or attitude changes occurred (Levels I and II of training evaluation). Evaluation of the implementation strategies and perceived usefulness at each of the four performance sites will also be carried out. The results of this project will provide guidance in future efforts to provide critical health information to our increasingly diverse population.
