At a show stopping event on June 22nd 2017, Multicultural Aged Care Inc officially unveiled their new brand to eager locals, clients, staff and health care stakeholders. The organisation is now known as ‘Multicultural Care’ to meet their objective to provide culturally-tailored care to everyone in the multicultural community, not just aged care recipients.
“As we are now a registered NDIS provider. This rebranding was crucial to ensuring local people with a disability felt we could meet their care needs,” said Multicultural Care CEO, Dr Rosy Walia.
“Becoming ‘Multicultural Care’ means we can continue to meet the aged care needs of multicultural communities in inner west, south west and south east Sydney, but also fill the gap being left by the lack of culturally-tailored disability care.”
Speakers at the rebrand launch event included Christine Regan, Senior Project Officer for the Rights Project for People with Disability, and Luis Moreno, NDIS Community Information and Promotion Officer from Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association of NSW Inc.
During his speech, Mr Moreno spoke about the impact culturally-tailored care has on culturally diverse clients.
“I was part of the first team that was ever called to provide translation services for a client. By overcoming the language barriers, we helped the client and service provider effectively determine the needs of the client and helped both parties understand one another. It opened my eyes to how important linguistic services are in providing effective care,” Mr Moreno said in his speech.
Christine Reagan pointed out the low NDIS participations rates from multicultural people and said service providers like Multicultural Care are key to improving these statistics.
“ABS data shows approximately 20% of Australians are from non-English speaking countries, yet only 4.2% of NDIS participants identify as being from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Participation is unacceptably low,” said Ms Reagan.
Multicultural Care caters to people from over 40 different language groups and hopes their new branding and services appeal to local multicultural people who require assistance to live fulfilling lives in their homes.
“We wanted a brand that showed we are inclusive of everyone, no matter what your cultural background, as well as something that showed our dedication and focus on customer-centric, caring services,” said Dr Walia. “I think we’ve managed to achieve that with the united symbolism the branding depicts.”
Multicultural Care will now begin helping families of multicultural people with a disability who are finding language barriers an issue when trying to navigate NDIS services, as well as those who wish to have bilingual care workers work with them to integrate cultural values and practises into their care plan.