The Donegal Intercultural Platform is involved in a number of health & well-being related actions and programmes in collaboration with the HSE Office of Suicide Prevention – Connecting for Life initiative, the Community Health Forums and other health and wellbeing initiatives. We are also involved with the Children and Young Persons Services Committee (CYPSC) through their Wellbeing Working Group.
Multi-lingual information bulletin on health & wellbeing launched in 2018
Following discussion at the County-wide Suicide Prevention initiative ‘Connecting For Life – Donegal’ steering group the Intercultural Platform was commissioned to draft, design and produce a multi-lingual information bulletin for people living in the county who do not have English as their mother tongue. The platform undertook to look at best practice across Ireland and further afield to help them produce a publication in English and six commonly used languages. These are Russian, Polish. French, Arabic, Romanian & Mandarin Chinese. (And now also in Portuguese as well!)
Follow this link to view / download the Multi-lingual bulletin.
http://www.pobail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Donegal-health-7-languages.pdf
This publication will be updated and expanded this year (2022) and will be launched in October as part of Mental Health Week with the help of the Connecting For Life initiative of the HSE.
Key messages about health provision
The Connecting For Life initiative was concerned that many people living in the County may not have very strong English, and wanted a simple and clear message about how and where people can access health services, emergency care, as well as mental health supports. The bulletin will also explain how non-English speakers can access translation and interpretation services at both emergency and primary care services at local level.
Hands-on distribution
This project delivered the multi-lingual health message in an interesting way – one third via community venues, a further third through information and health outlets and the final third with a Platform member attached! The ideas is to call door to door with some of the leaflets and visiting members of ethnic minority communities and providing an outreach into housing estates and smaller towns outside Letterkenny to link people to supports, services and into the Intercultural Platform.
Volunteers wanted: If you would like to help in this project and distribute copies of the bulletin in your community or to ethic minority community organisations and associations, or if you would like to join the platform and get involved in our wider work – please: Call/text 086 084 1433 or email us on donegalip@gmail.com
Intercultural Community Engagement (I.C.E. Health Information Project 2018/19)
The Intercultural Platform joined with the Local Community Development Committee and the County Council to help deliver a special project reaching out to the wide range of ethnic minority communities, groups and families living in county Donegal. The aim of the project was to engage with these communities and promote health and wellbeing, access to a range of supports, activities and services all over Donegal. As part of the programme we designed, developed and launched our multi-lingual website that signposted these activities and services and listed some of the information in multi-lingual form. We are really excited about this development for the Intercultural platform. For info: Call/text 0860841433 or email us on donegalip@gmail.com