February 4, 2010
Come celebrate the updated Ethnomed cross-cultural health resource Feb. 9
A physician wants to know more about the medicinal herbs her Ethiopian patient is taking and if they might interact with a drug she is about to prescribe. A Russian-speaking patient tells his English-speaking night-shift nurse that he is no longer in pain by using the bilingual Point-to-Talk page the nurse has printed out. A social worker watches a video on various cultural perspectives of mental health. A Cambodian mother seeks ways to protect her family from the flu.
They can do all this and more on EthnoMed.org. The Web site gives information about cultural beliefs, medical issues and other topics pertinent to the health care of people from many countries and cultures. The site is well visited by health care providers and patients alike.
A celebration and demonstration of the site will take place from 11 a.m. to noon Tuesday, February 9, at the Health Sciences Library, 2nd Floor, UW Health Sciences Building. The main entrance to the library is on the 3rd Floor of the T wing. A brief program begins at 11:15 a.m., and light refreshments will be served. For more information about the event, see the Ethnomed Celebration site. The UW community and the general public are invited.
What started nearly 15 years ago as a compilation of useful articles written by health-care providers and caseworker cultural mediators at Harborview’s Community House Calls Program has become an even more robust resource for cross-cultural health care, with a number of new features recently added. Among the improvements are easier navigation for browsing content by cultures, clinical topics, languages, and patient education topics. The site, one of the developers observed, is at the intersection of culture and health. It even has a multicultural calendar of coming holidays.
The newly transformed EthnoMed Web site, funded by the National Library of Medicine and the result of collaboration between UW Health Sciences Library and Harborview Medical Center, utilizes a new content management system and emphasizes usability and accessibility. Staff, faculty and librarians worked together on the redesign
“The site has been updated to better help health-care providers improve their cultural competence and to offer more health information to the community,” said Ann Marchand, program support supervisor at Harborview’s Interpreter Services Department and part of the team that builds the site. “Patient education hand-outs have been translated into several languages. The site shows health care providers new ways to relate to their patients, as in the case of explaining procedures, like why Pap smears are done.
“We are looking toward the possibility that students and more faculty could publish on the site through a Contribution Pathways Program,” Marchand added. A global health student, for instance, might have insights to share after returning from an international volunteer program. Another student might create educational materials to fulfill a course assignment.
What Marchand said she finds most exciting about re-working the site was looking at new ways to present ideas, give health tips, and teach self-care skills.
“We can now post patient-care videos, and I think that’s been grand,” she said. “Maybe patients will watch these in a doctor’s waiting room.”
