Hepatitis B is preventable disease that especially impacts immigrant populations in the United States. At the same time, the COIVD-19 pandemic continues to threaten people’s lives. Vaccines play a role in preventing these and other diseases and presently dominates the news. Recent outbreaks of measles in New York and other cities in America are due to mistrust of the healthcare system, as well as literacy and language barriers. Vaccine hesitancy is a growing problem that threatens global community protection against COVID-19, Hepatitis B and other preventable diseases.

The primary goal of the EduAsians Hep B project is to launch and sustain a Hepatitis B prevention coalition in Boston by embedding health literacy lessons surrounding Hepatitis B, and COVID-19 into English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes. Research demonstrates, introducing health topics in settings heavily utilized by immigrant populations has been shown in to increase knowledge and action among individual English language learners and the broader community. While an effective public health promotion strategy, this work has not yet been broadly implemented limiting the cumulative impact of sustained access to health information in a robustly supported environment. 

Lessons are designed to engage learners in dialogue and reflection to create a safe space where adult learners from diverse background can share their knowledge, formulate questions, and identify where they can go to learn more. Collaborators meet once a month to review and brainstorm ways to create comprehensive yet level-appropriate lessons that will most benefit adult English language learners and the broader immigrant community. Researchers will present results of surveys administered at monthly meetings and the process of pilot testing the lessons in community-based settings.    

The EduAsians Hep B project is a collaboration between community based ESOL providing organizations, Asian Women for Health advocacy organization, and experts in Hepatitis B prevention and treatment and education and lesson plan development from Tufts Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Health literacy and health equity 

Health literacy for immigrant populations