Irish-based health workers create multilingual Covid-19 guides for immigrants 

Sophia Egan: Features in the multilingual vaccine information video series.

Meet the young Irish healthcare professional reaching out to migrants in her native Swahili as part of a new initiative to promote the take-up of Covid-19 vaccines.

Sophia Egan, 26, an infectious disease surveillance assistant in Cork, is one of several healthcare experts who feature in a multilingual vaccine information video series which goes live tomorrow in 36 languages.

And TranslateIreland.ie, the company behind it, believes it has global potential amid warnings from public health experts around the world that poor information sharing with migrants has led to lower levels of vaccine take-up among those communities.

Sophia said migrant groups are often on the margins of society, which perpetuates health inequalities.

“The old saying, ‘lost in translation’ is not a myth,” she said. “Health campaigns, particularly in times of a public health emergency, can be more effective when everyone in the population clearly understands the information presented and in a language and terms they are more familiar with.” 

Sophia father, retired anesthesiologist, Dr Eugene Egan, from Cork, met her mother, Stella Mwampeta, a nurse, while they were working in hospitals in Tanzania in the early 1990s.

She was born in Moshi, near Mount Kilimanjaro, in 1994, and was raised speaking Swahili and her mother’s tribal language, Nyakyusa. She learned English at school.

When her mother died 11 years ago, the family moved back to Ireland. She had to learn English, as it's spoken here, and sat the Leaving Cert two years later.

She graduated from UCC with a degree in biochemistry, before completing a Masters in Public Health. She has a specific interest in migrant health, and began working as an infectious disease surveillance assistant with the HSE South, where her work for the last year has been dominated by analysis of Covid-19 data on cases, outbreaks and trends.

During the pandemic, TranslateIreland.ie produced several multilingual public health videos, and has now worked with the HSE’s Social Inclusion unit to develop the latest vaccine information videos, in an initiative supported by the Irish College of General Practitioners.

The videos are presented by doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who are  from overseas but who are now living in Ireland. The languages include Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Filipino, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

Swahili is spoken widely in several African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

Dr Taciane Alegra, a Brazilian paediatrician working in Dublin, presents a video message in Portuguese.

“It is so relevant to engage migrants, talking to them in a way that not only they can understand, but also in a way that they feel part of the society and engage to play their role,” she said. 

Translate Ireland’s CEO Graham Clifford said the scale and scope of the project has been immense.

“I'm so proud that Ireland has become a world leader in sharing such important information with migrants," he said.

According to the last census almost 90,000 people in Ireland say they do not speak English at all or, if so, at a poor level.

The videos go live on the company’s site tomorrow and they will also be shared on HSElive.ie.