Innovative Multi-cultural Public Health Education Strategy Brings the Latest Evidence on Dementia to Lower Mainland Communities

By Helen Novak Lauscher

The UBC Faculty of Medicine, eHealth Strategy Office recently hosted a public health education forum called “Getting to Know Dementia”, aimed at engaging and educating the Lower Mainland’s South Asian population. Leading community physicians and allied health professionals presented on prevention, diagnosis, treatment and management of dementia and hosted a Q&A session at this free event attended by over 650 community members on March 8, 2009. Patient-centered educational pamphlets and an interactive patient-centred website (www.ehealth.med.ubc.ca/dementia) were also launched.

This forum, held in Surrey, was a key component of an exciting initiative entitled “Supporting Patients and Their Families in the Evidence-based Management of Dementia: A Multi-cultural and multi-media approach through informatics”, funded by an Alzheimer Society of B.C. grant. This project strives to improve dementia care through an innovative and interactive patient health informatics solution. The evaluation of this public engagement initiative is supported in part by TEKTIC grant funding.

Our goal is to develop, disseminate and evaluate interactive educational materials for patients in Chinese, and Punjabi and English in synchrony with the interactive materials currently being developed for physicians as part of the educational branch of the BC Alzheimer Drug Therapy Initiative. Patient-centered education materials are being distributed to the public through various means, including:

• Health forums hosted in the community’s language, by leading community physicians and allied health professionals, held in partnership with ASBC, Vancouver Coastal Health, and Fraser Health and a host of other community partners;
• Linguistically and culturally appropriate interactive websites; and
• Patient-friendly pamphlets in Chinese and Punjabi provided to patients by their physicians.

On October 11^th, 2008, we held the counterpart Chinese public forum and launched the dementia section of the website (www.iconproject.org). This forum event was an enormous success, with over 700 community members in attendance, along with 8 physician presenters, as well as representatives from Alzheimer Society of BC, the Ministry of Health and Vancouver Coastal Health.