Partnership Health Canterbury

Partnership Health Canterbury strives to improve the health of all its enrolled communities in Canterbury by supporting the delivery of high quality primary health care, promoting good health to stop people getting ill and working hard to ensure everyone is accessing primary health care when they need it.

Partnership Health Canterbury – Te Kei o Te Waka is a not for profit organisation and was launched in April 2004. It is the Primary Health Organisation (PHO) that has the largest enrolled population in New Zealand. There are more than 367,000 people enrolled with Partnership Health Canterbury, including over 22,000 Maori, 22,000 Asian and 8,700 Pacific Islanders.

Partnership Health Canterbury works in partnership with its communities and 98 General Practices and other health service providers to improve the health and well-being of the enrolled population.

Visit the website of Partnership Health Canterbury.

Projects 2011
Health Promotion

Education around primary healthcare, NZ health service, access to services for refugees and migrant with a focus on the following:

  • Translation of health related material.
  • Creation of language specific website.
  • Cultural training to medical professionals and associated groups.
Chinese Cooking Class

International research is pointing to the rapid increase of Type 2 Diabetes amongst Asian peoples. This increase is exacerbated by the acculturation process. Asian migrants are not healthy and wealthy as the myth suggests. Based on the results and recommendations of ‘Nutritional Needs Assessment of East Asians Living in Christchurch’, Partnership Health is developing a cooking programme for Chinese migrants. This is considered an appropriate strategy in addressing identified needs for linguistically and culturally appropriate nutrition resources and services.

The main objectives of the Chinese Cooking Programme are to:

  • Improve participants’ knowledge of healthy eating, healthy unfamiliar western food and healthy cooking methods.
  • Knowledge and skills about how to make healthy food choices.
  • Skills to use unfamiliar cooking facilities such as electric ovens.
  • Skills to cook healthy easy western food to increase food variety.The ‘From Cooking Skills to Life Skills’ cooking programme is being adapted to meet the above objectives.

This also includes the translation into Chinese of the ‘Great Little Cookbook’ – the first such translation in New Zealand.

Partnership Health Website

Access to linguistically-specific health information by both patients and health professionals is difficult. Whilst much material is available, locating it when needed is impossible.

Partnership Health is developing a ‘Refugee and Migrant’ section on their website. This will cover the following:

  • Links to known health information which can be of help to both patient and health professional.
  • Downloadable patient information on disease, health access and prevention that health professionals can access to give to their patients.
  • Readily accessible consumer information on disease, nutrition, education, health access.
  • Links to other organisations such as Family Planning and the Cancer Society where language-specific information is available.
Advocacy for appropriate linguistic communication in Christchurch

The earthquake-related disasters in Christchurch have highlighted a severe lack of understanding and acceptance of the need for appropriate linguistic communication in Christchurch. One of the key issues is that currently, earthquake-related information is not reaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities. Partnership Health Canterbury is therefore one of a number of Christchurch-based organisations advocating to strengthen and improve the quality, broaden the reach and streamline the delivery of timely (emergency-related) information disseminated to CALD Communities.

Translation of earthquake-related material

Partnership Health Canterbury will focus on translating and publishing earthquake-related material into 16 languages.

Contact : Wayne Reid, wayne@partnershiphealth.org.nz

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