VALUABLE RESOURCE:

ECHO Minnesota

Emergency, Community, Health & Outreach

By  DeDee Varner

When the HealthPartners Equitable Care Fellows gathered on March 6 for our annual kick-off dinner, fellowship and training event, Dr. Patricia Walker shared a sad story about a patient who needlessly died simply because, as a new immigrant, he did not know that help was a 3-digit phone call away. You can read more on this touching story in April's Minnesota Medicine:http://www.minnesotamedicine.com/portals/mnmed/april%202013/lostintranslation1304.pdf .

Explaining community safety and health concepts to non-English speakers became a little easier in 2004, with the establishment of ECHO Minnesota.  ECHO has been collaborating with diverse communities to deliver programs and services that help people be healthy, contribute, and succeed in the local community.  ECHO collaborates with spokespersons in East African, Latino, and Southeast Asian communities.  These spokespersons serve a role similar to a news anchor or media talent to host programs and create emergency public service announcements for radio, television, phone, community outreach and print communications.

Perhaps you have seen a snippet of an ECHO program on a local public television station.  Did you know that all of the programs are also available at any time on the ECHO website?

Resources at your Fingertips

If you only have time to make one click, check out this page on ECHO: http://www.echominnesota.org/tools/echo-tv/view-all-shows .  Here you will find a listing of all shows already sorted by topic area.  Select a topic of interest and a specific show title; each show is about 25 minutes in length.  The script is also available to download and print.