BACKGROUND: Asthma tends to be less well controlled among ethnic minority groups, and its prevalence in new immigrants increases significantly the longer they are in Canada; mainly due to their lack of familiarity with English and difficulty understanding information regarding the disease, health literacy, cultural issues, housing conditions, and lack of access to appropriate care services. OBJECTIVE: To explore the effectiveness of different formats of culturally relevant information and its impact on asthma patients' self-management within the Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese communities. METHODS: Using a participatory approach, we developed and tested knowledge and community educational videos (with similar information, but used a different approach, ie, scientific versus colloquial) and a pictorial pamphlet. A total of 92 physician-diagnosed adult asthma patients (47 Chinese and 45 Punjabi) were assigned at random to three experimental groups (watched one or both videos) and one comparison group (read pictorial pamphlet) and participated in three in-person interviews and one telephone interview within a 9-month period. Patients received education on asthma self-management via videos and pamphlet and outcomes, including their knowledge of asthma triggers (environmental-related and behavioral-related triggers) and symptoms; inhaler use skills and patient-reported medication adherence were measured. RESULTS: Knowledge of asthma symptoms, inhaler use, and understanding of physician's instructions improved significantly from pretest to 3 months post-intervention follow-up among all participants. CONCLUSIONS: Participants performed significantly better at follow-up than they did at baseline assessment, with the most notable improvements observed in the group that watched both community and knowledge videos. The results suggest that short, simple, culturally, and linguistically appropriate interventions can promote knowledge gain about asthma and improve inhaler use that can be sustained over the short term. Such interventions that provide authentic learning materials that draw on patients' life experiences and sociocultural context can overcome certain limitations of conventional patient education approaches. The ClinicalTrials.gov registry identifier is NCT01474928.

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