Spotlight on Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health
About Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health
Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health (MCWH) is a national community-based organisation that is led by and for women from migrant and refugee communities to advance the health and wellbeing of these communities. MCWH increases migrant and refugee women’s opportunities for health and wellbeing in Australia through bilingual health education, advocacy and leadership. MCWH also delivers training and capacity-building for workers and workforces and coordinates a multilingual health information library.
Featured work: Workforce of Multilingual Health Educators (WOMHEn) Project
MCWH coordinates the ‘Workforce of multilingual health educators’ (WOMHEn) project (now in its third phase). The project builds on their forty-year history of delivering in-language peer-to-peer health education. WOMHEn was established in March 2021 through state government funding, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project created Victoria’s first coordinated workforce of bilingual and multilingual health educators, with educators based at women’s health services across the state.
Initially the workforce was funded to prevent further outbreaks of Covid-19 via in-language health education sessions, and to document participant experiences of the virus to help to inform recovery initiatives and policy. More recently, the workforce has undergone further training to deliver on topics including mental health, sexual and reproductive health, healthy relationships, navigating the Australian health care system, and disaster preparedness, response and recovery.
Key achievements to date include:
42 workers completed MCWH’s accredited multilingual health education training, equipping them with the skills and knowledge to deliver in-language and culturally appropriate health education sessions across metro Melbourne and regional Victoria.
250+ health education sessions delivered across Victoria, reaching over 5000 migrant and refugee women and covering 20+ languages. This included women from Filipino, Pakistani, Indian, Jordanian, South Sudanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and other communities.
Topics included Covid-19, sexual and reproductive health, healthy relationships, and mental health, among many others. Demand outstripped capacity, demonstrating how needed these kinds of sessions are.
The Left Behind: Migrant and Refugee Women’s Experiences of COVID-19 report, drawing on interviews with more than 70 women to reveal how the pandemic had impacted on migrant and refugee women’s health, economic security, and social lives.
The Breaking the Barriers: Migrant and refugee women’s experiences of health care in Victoria report, drawing on an additional 63 interviews to further understand migrant and refugee women’s experiences of accessing COVID-19 vaccines and the health care system.
Support for the health education workforce via MCWH’s Multilingual Resource Portal and evidenced based multilingual health resources, as well as ongoing knowledge-sharing and networking opportunities.
What’s next for this work?
Through the WOMHEn project, MCWH will continue to provide professional development opportunities and training to inform bilingual health education delivery, multilingual health resources, and networking opportunities to the women’s health services’ network of bilingual health educators. Women’s health services will continue to learn more about the migrant and refugee community groups living within their catchment areas, helping services better support changing community health information needs and working towards breaking down barriers to accessing health information and services experienced by migrant and refugee communities.
The multilingual health education workforce is currently ready to respond to new and emerging public health concerns by providing in-language and culturally appropriate health information to migrant and refugee communities in Australia. MCWH and the women’s health sector will continue to advocate for this workforce as a vital part of Victoria’s healthcare infrastructure.
To find out more about the MCWH’s work, visit https://www.mcwh.com.au/