The Online Availability of Multilingual Health Promotion Materials Produced by Local Health Departments: an Information Assessment.
OBJECTIVE
Local Health Departments (LHDs) are a key source of health promotion information. For ethnically and culturally diverse communities, it becomes important to provide minorities with language appropriate health information. This project sought to assess the availability of multilingual health promotion materials on LHD websites in Washington State (WA), USA.


METHODS
We performed a cross-sectional study of all 34 LHD websites in WA. We collected and classified health promotion documents available to the public, specifically, whether translated versions were available. We also assessed the extent of document sharing between LHDs.


RESULTS
We identified 1,624 documents across 34 LHDs. Topics most frequently covered were communicable diseases and emergency preparedness. Fewer than 10% of documents were available in non-English languages. We found little evidence of document sharing between LHDs; only 5% of all documents were shared between LHDs.


CONCLUSIONS
WA LHDs provide a variety of health promotion materials for the public, but few multilingual materials are available online. New technologies for facilitating document sharing and machine translation may improve the present landscape.
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Daniel
D
Capurro
Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
Shomir
S
Chaudhuri
Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
Anne M
AM
Turner
D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D006297:Health Services Accessibility / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D020407:Internet / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D009111:Local Government; D019303:Multilingualism; D009862:Online Systems; D011635:Public Health Administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012041:Regional Medical Programs; D014175:Translating; D014861:Washington