Good medicine for poor language skills
Pino Migliorino, Chairperson FECCA, Dale Holmes, General Manager, AFL for NSW and ACT and Jacquie Stephenson, Senior Programme Officer, National Prescribing Service
The programme called Get to Know Your Medicines was named tonight as winner of the Community Category of the National Multicultural Marketing Awards in Sydney.
The goal of the project was to improve the awareness and knowledge among Cantonese, Mandarin and Italian speaking seniors about how to use medicines safety and wisely.
The partners in the project became aware that low proficiency in spoken-English and low literacy skills represent a danger for older people in the use of medicines.
Thousands of people have problems each year with using medicines incorrectly, resulting in sickness, permanent disability and even death.
It was realised that there was a need to design and market information on the safe use of medicines, using translated material and other communication tools.
A community education and information campaign was then designed using well- established health promotion theory. Other goals were to highlight the role of key consumer information intermediaries and channels such as bilingual general practitioners and pharmacists.
They organised national radio advertising, in-language radio interviews and talkback with bilingual health professionals.
Bilingual information resources, including Questions to Ask you Doctor, and bilingual medicines lists were developed.
Multilingual web pages and access to translated resources were established on the National Prescribing Service website
A targetted community partnership strategy was implemented working with peak Chinese and Italian community organisation was used to organise education seminars supported by the Get to Know your medicines Presentation Kit"
The results were impressive - over 110,000 information resources were ordered as a result of the seminars; over three thousand seniors participated in the seminars with the 16 Chinese and Italian partner organisations
"This project can be said to be literally a matter of life and death and happily it appears to have been very effective.
"We are a multicultural society. To make sure we look after all of our people, especially older Australians, we have a responsibility to employ effective multicultural marketing techniques to do that job.
Happily much of this has become second-nature or even automatic for many but not for all. Thats the continuing benefit of these awards in highlighting what has been done well, what can be done and what should be done".