Abstract
South Western Sydney is one of the most culturally diverse regions in Australia. Health literacy and health outcomes are often lower than the state and national average. While there are health literacy resources available in other languages, these are typically generic information and do not provide details of local services. For health literacy resources that do include information on local services, there is no coordinated approach to ensure they are appropriate and accessible, in relevant community languages. As a result, there is a lack of equity of access to high-quality local health literacy content for CALD communities within Australia. Health Resource Directory (HRD) is a program which currently provides health literacy content on more than 300 topics in both English and relevant community languages on a site navigable in the top three languages spoken in South Western Sydney. South Western Sydney Primary Health Network (SWSPHN) has developed a system that enables the development of high-quality, accessible health literacy content at scale using a cost-effective model including integration into the local HealthPathways program.
HRD is a health literacy platform aimed at supporting health consumers in South Western Sydney to better understand and manage their health condition, how they can work with their GP in accessing care and understand what services are available locally to support their care. Content is reviewed and endorsed by local general practitioners as well as community members as part of the development and quality control process.
Content creation and review is tied into the HealthPathways development schedule to ensure all HealthPathways go live with health literacy resources available for GPs to share with their patients and HRD content is reviewed at regular intervals. This also ensures HRD t is clinically consistent with HealthPathways’ clinical guidance as this used as the source of truth during content creation.
Strict standards are applied to readability, structure, length and content to ensure resources are easily printable by primary care as an adjunct to their typical care, as well as ensuring production efficiencies and quality standards. Systems to ensure NAATI certified translations of each resource occur in print, online and audio formats in Arabic, simplified Chinese and Vietnamese.
Usage of HRD has been high, with translated content typically dominating the most accessed factsheets. Two evaluations of the program have occurred. The first evaluation compared HRD content to that provided by the industry leaders and found HRD content consistently scored lower readability level, indicated a greater ease of understanding. The second evaluation examined GP experiences using HRD factsheets with results indicating GPs trusted HRD content as it was derived from HealthPathways, they were easy to find via HealthPathways and they found the focus on enhancing the patient-GP relationship beneficial to their practice.
Refinements to the content creation system are planned for 23/24 to further improve cost efficiencies without reducing quality. Expansion into other regions as well as inclusion of additional languages and First Nations versions is also being explored.