Empowering Refugees and Immigrants Through Transformational Home Language Health Education

This study focuses on the importance of providing health education materials that are understandable, actionable, and linguistically and culturally sustaining, and therefore transformational for refugees and immigrants.We explored refugee and immigrant patient experiences with language specific diabetes education videos by conducting four separate focus groups with speakers of Pashto, Dari, Burmese, and Spanish to understand if and how the videos align with the health literacy guidelines of understandability and actionability, and the tenets of culturally sustaining pedagogy with a focus on long-term change.In addition to cultural and linguistic findings, we note that participants felt more confident in approaching their health care provider with questions after viewing the videos, a transformational behavior to achieve greater health outcomes for themselves.This study has implications for expanding language access within and across health care systems and for the way health literacy can be integrated into adult education language learning classrooms. Note:We are grateful to Suad Ali and Mary Helen O'Connor for support with outreach, access to facilities, recruitment, organization, and coordination; to Coco Lukas for her contribution to data analysis and triangulation; and to Marhaba Alkozai, Esther Hau Dim, and Gabriela Durn for providing interpretation