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Multilingual Health Resources on the Internet
The Web offers a plethora of quality health information, yet a large number of residents of the United States cannot take advantage of these resources due to their limited knowledge of English. While there still is a shortage of quality, non-English, health resources available online, a number of worthwhile bilingual and multilingual sites do exist, offering consumer health information, and bibliographic and full-text resources in a wide array of languages.
For the health consumer who speaks and reads Spanish, the New York Online Access to Health (NOAH) Web site http://www.noah-health.org/ provides a wealth of information in both English and Spanish. The user can browse health-related topics or search the site using keywords. There also are links to New York State health-care providers, hospitals, HMOs and support groups.
In 2000, an executive order made it mandatory that all federally funded activities be "accessible to all persons who, as a result of national origin, are not proficient or are limited in their ability to communicate in the English language." For this reason, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has begun translating many of its agency Web sites into more than 15 foreign languages, especially where information is vital to the public or where a large portion of the population served by an agency does not read English. See the Department of Health and Human Services Foreign Language Web Site's http://www.hhs.gov/gateway/ "Language Access Initiative" links for multilingual HHS health resources.
Another valuable site for multilingual health information is the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library's Health Education Brochures in Multiple Languages http://medstat.med.utah.edu/library/refdesk/24lang.html, produced by the University of Utah. This site provides access to more than 200 health-education brochures in 24 different languages, as well as links to other multilingual health resources. The NSW Multicultural Health Communication Service http://www.mhcs.health.nsw.gov.au/ was created for health professionals in Australia, but is an excellent multilingual resource, no matter where in the world one lives. There are more than 300 publications on health in a wide range of languages, as well as links to related Web sites.
Finally, for health care professionals, there is Culture, Health and Literacy Indices http://www.worlded.org/us/health/docs/culture/indices.html, which not only contains health-education materials in many languages—there is an alphabetical index to languages included on the site—but also has information on topics that are population and culture-specific. There also are links to foreign-language health organization Web sites. Another valuable resource for cultural information is Ethnomed: Ethnic Medicine Information from Harborview Medical Center http://ethnomed.org. This site provides "information about cultural beliefs, (and) medical…and other related issues pertinent to the health care of recent immigrants," many of whom fled from war-torn parts of the world, including Mexico, Cambodia and Ethiopia. There are links to patient-education materials produced in the native languages of different cultural groups. For the clinician seeking educational materials for his or her foreign-language speaking patients, there is a direct link to these documents at http://ethnomed.org/ethnomed/patient_ed/.
-Michelle LaVoie, University Libraries