By Ethan Nguyen, University of Pennsylvania Asian Health Initiatives Elderly Southeast Asian Americans face tremendous barriers in accessing quality health care. These challenges to quality care are numerous, including limited-English-proficient status, inability to navigate the health care system, and poor health literacy.
Here in Philadelphia, Our Stories, Our Health is a collaborative media health initiative aiming to engage immigrant Laotian and Vietnamese seniors in the process of identifying and describing health needs through personal storytelling, video production, and discussion about health in the Southeast Asian community. A Southeast Asian Elders Council selected the topics of focus, which will be high blood pressure and doctor-patient communication. Through digital videos to be produced by elders trained under this project, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants will their stories about personal experiences dealing with health. These videos will be incorporated into community workshops intended to encourage discussion on health disparities and communication barriers faced by immigrants.
Our Stories, Our Health is supported by a $225,000 award from New Routes to Community Health, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation designed to improve the health of immigrants in the United States through media created by immigrants. Partners are the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMAAC), University of Pennsylvania, WHYY public broadcasting, Thomas Jefferson University and Temple University.
The project's progress can be tracked on the New Routes website (http://newroutes.org/projects/ourstoriesourhealth) and on the photo blog (http://nrphila.wordpress.com/).
The Penn Asian Health Initiative operates on the mission of utilizing research and community involvement as a dynamic approach to increase the ability of disparate populations to access health services, integrate the research knowledge within academia with the personal experiences of the public community, and engage the community as an active partner with public health professionals working towards the goal of enabling equal quality care access for all.
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