Continence Foundation of Australia

Finalist - 'Excellence within the not-for-profit sector'

Incontinence Outreach in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities

The Continence Foundation of Australia’s mission is to represent the interests of Australians affected by, or at risk of, bladder and bowel control problems and act as an advocate for their interests.

The Continence Foundation of Australia exists to serve all Australians by promoting bladder and bowel health. This will be achieved by working with consumers, professionals and industry; facilitating access to continence support services; providing evidence based information and advice, and building the capacity and capability of the workforce. The Continence Foundation also coordinates a wide range of educational and awareness raising activities and events.

The Continence Foundation undertook a special project targeting CALD communities in 2012-13. The project developed and piloted a health promotion initiative targeting specific CALD communities in the education and awareness of incontinence. In other words, to effectively engage with CALD communities to improve their health literacy of incontinence and encourage help-seeking behaviours.

The initiatives included:

• new multilingual web pages for CALD communities and health professionals working with these communities; and
• three new guidelines for health professionals and interpreters in a continence assessment setting.

The new language resources provide links to 17 bilingual fact sheets on topics such as poor bladder and bowel control, dementia, prostate issues, incontinence products and financial assistance. There are also audio translations of all fact sheets. These are available to download on the continence website. A promotional video was also developed, targeting CALD communities on the importance of incontinence in any language and the need to seek help.

Based on the success of the CALD project, the Foundation extended the project to its second stage. The project is currently in the final month of this second stage, of which 27 information forums in 3 languages (Cantonese, Mandarin and Arabic) are in the process of being delivered to CALD communities in three states (Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia) to further promote the new resources and raise awareness of incontinence.

The number of calls received by the National Continence Helpline (NCHL), from callers using the Telephone Interpreting Service or with the assistance of family members and friends to access the Helpline, has more than doubled since the introduction of the project’s initiatives. Feedback regarding the translated webpages has also been positive, confirming the translated webpages have been well received: “I have used a lot of bilingual websites and this is one of the best. Others are not as comprehensive and only certain sections are available in other languages. I liked that we had so much information available in other languages.”