Newswise — In an effort to foster dialogues about health and healthcare services in Philadelphia's Southeast Asian immigrant community, leading local healthcare institutions have joined with community and media to crack the knowledge and language barriers that often prevent this population from accessing preventive and other health services. Media Partnerships for Community Engagement in Southeast Asian Health is a joint project of some of Philadelphia's leading medical providers and media, including lead partners the University of Pennsylvania Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, WHYY, Philadelphia's premier public broadcasting station, and the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMAAC); and consulting partners Temple University Center for Intergenerational Learning and Thomas Jefferson University Department of Health Policy. The collaboration seeks to address the gaps in healthcare access for the region's Southeast Asian community through a comprehensive community-based campaign. Philadelphia County has the largest Southeast Asian refugee population in Pennsylvania.
Media Partnerships for Community Engagement in Southeast Asian Health will launch on March 26, 2008 with an open house at WHYY from 9:30 a.m-11a.m. The project is part of New Routes to Community Health, a national project of the Benton Foundation, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Over the next several months, immigrants will participate in creating first-person videos about hypertension, language barriers and doctor-patient communication. These topics were chosen by the SEAMAAC Vietnamese and Laotian Elder Council. The videos will be shown at workshops to train and empower elders to help new Southeast Asian immigrants, and educate health professionals and the public on the immigrant experience of the US healthcare system.
"Working with SEAMAAC, we aim to make a real difference in the way Southeast Asian immigrants access and experience healthcare, by having them address their own needs in a format that can reach the entire community," says Giang Nguyen, MD, MPH, MSCE, University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, the project's partnership manager. "WHYY will build on its success in training family caregivers, students and retirees to record and edit their own experiences on video," says Willo Carey, Executive Director of WHYY's Wider Horizons service. WHYY's Learning Lab will work with the Elder Council on this intergenerational project, and TV12 will produce short stories for the general public about the immigrant experience in healthcare. The stories will be available on WHYY's digital Wider Horizons channel and on the Wider Horizons website (http://www.whyy.org/widerhorizons).
New Routes to Community Health is a program of the Benton Foundation, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to improving health and healthcare for all Americans. Visit http://newroutes.org/ for more information. Visit http://nrphila.wordpress.com/ to see photographic journaling of Philadelphia's New Routes project, Media Partnerships for Community Engagement in Southeast Asian Health.
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