Mobilizing the community to address the prenatal health needs of Immigrant Punjabi women

Abstract

In Canada, although prenatal education is available to all women, there are groups who do not access these services. One such group is Immigrant Punjabi women residing in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. It was apparent that structured prenatal education, even when translation was available, would not meet the needs of this group. Efforts were required to help bring this issue into the community so that the community would endorse women's participation in prenatal preparation. The purpose of the project described in this article was to explore how community mobilization strategies could be used to improve the health of pregnant women in the Punjabi community. A collaborative approach was used with representatives from a variety of service agencies and the community. The mobilization strategy involved creating a platform to communicate with the community about prenatal health and health care, creating "buy-in" from the physicians serving the women of the community, and providing prenatal sessions that built on the existing knowledge of the women. We describe the mobilization process and discuss the insights gained.