The Online Availability of Multilingual Health Promotion Materials Produced by Local Health Departments: an Information Assessment

Objectives: 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.