Over three years, the Health in My Language program has delivered in-language health education to over 60,000 people, in every state and territory, through a skilled workforce of migrant and refugee women health educators. Over this time, educators all over the country have only been able to meet via screens to debrief, train and share learnings. But this month, that changed.
At the national ‘My Health, My Language Forum’ held in Naarm (Melbourne), bilingual and bicultural health workers from all around Australia celebrated their work, shared their hopes, and planned for the future of health education with colleagues, collaborators and funders for the first time since the program first launched in 2022. “What COVID was able to do was show us where we were going wrong”, Anushe Khan, project coordinator from Women’s Health Matters in ACT shared, “we saw health inequity become quite obvious.”
Opening the event, CEO of MCWH Adele Murdolo said, “COVID-19 was like a litmus test”. Migrant and refugee communities were less likely to access testing and had lower vaccination rates, leading in part to people born overseas dying at a rate 1.4 times greater than the general population. The stark finding made it clear that better solutions were needed, not just in Victoria, but across the country.”
In her keynote address, Bilingual Health Educator, Israa Sedda, from Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Service in Western Australia explained the problem clearly: “Many women in our communities arrive in Australia with hope. But they’re entering a new and unfamiliar system… Some have never had the opportunity to speak about their own health because the systems around them have not created safe or accessible spaces. Others have faced environments where seeking information or care is met with stigma, discrimination, or structural barriers, making silence feel like the only option.”
Bilingual health education can go some way in addressing this. “The main priority is prevention”, Hamidah Hassana, a health educator from Red Cross South Australia shared. While education and prevention are at the heart of bilingual health education, the program delivers more: empowerment, community, and trust.
Throughout the forum, educators shared their stories of how health education changes lives. “A moment that will always stay with me was a breast cancer awareness session I led in Arabic”, MCWH’s May Alqas Alias said in her keynote. “The group of 12 women who attended that session made a beautiful, collective decision—they booked their breast screening appointments together… A few weeks later, one of the women reached out to me. She had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer—something that might have gone unnoticed without that session. Because she acted early, she was able to get timely treatment. Today, she’s doing well. She’s living her life.”
Health education changes, and in some cases, saves lives, but as Israa and May noted, it’s time to change systems. Rather than asking, ‘what do migrant and refugee women lack’, we need to ask, ‘how do our systems drive inequity?’
A lack of embedded bicultural and bilingual support in the Australian health system is a big part of why health inequities persist, while efforts to address this have often gone underfunded. As Co-Health Bi-cultural Program Lead, Jasmine Phillips said, migrant and refugee women leaders and organisations “have been expected to be a resource that mainstream organisations and government can draw upon to inform programs, to codesign… to do research, in an unpaid environment. And if they are funded, so often they are in a heavily casualised, short-term workforce.” This challenge of short-term funding plagues the health education workforce, meaning many strong, passionate, and skilled bilingual health educators must give up this work, even when they want to continue.
And the work is vitally important. As the Health in My Language Evaluation Report highlights, 98% of participants in Health in My Language’s most recent cycle said they would share the information they learnt with others, while 94% said they would talk to their healthcare provider about sexual and reproductive health. But participants themselves say it best: “It was good to learn about all those pregnancy options, but the best part was to know that it’s our right to make decisions about our own body and health.” That is the kind of impact we want to sustain for as long as we can.
This article was first published in edition #149 of The WRAP on September 2025.