How do you provide the best care? Ask.

How do you ensure that the health care services you’re offering patients continue to meet their needs? Simple: keep asking them. That’s the approach Greene County Health Care, Inc. (GCHC) takes. The group's outreach program serves 15,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers across eight North Carolina counties. 

“When we started the program 11 years ago, we kept the clinic open until 9:00 pm or later to ensure its availability, but no one came!” says Steve Davis, Farmworker Resource Director for GCHC.  “It turns out the workers stayed in the field until dark, which in the summertime can be as late as 9:00 pm, plus transportation was a barrier.  Now we bring the clinic to the patients.” 

GCHC receives federal, state and private funding to provide a farm worker outreach program that serves as a bridge between the clinic and the community.  Through it, GCHC offers farm workers onsite access to basic health assessments, community health education and care, and transportation. This is accomplished through an outreach staff of case managers, educators, interpreters and other providers, as well as lay health providers who work with diabetic patients. 

Program goals include building trust, so that more people will utilize the clinics, as well as to improve the clinical staffs understanding of patients’ living conditions and health care needs.

In order to maintain the program’s effectiveness, GCHC conducts focus groups among the farm worker population to determine topics of interest and need.  Preseason priorities often include pesticide safety and hypertension.  By mid-season, interests will shift to illnesses the workers have witnessed or experienced, such as heat stroke and communicable disease.

Focus groups have yielded another finding.  The workers long for diversions, such as soccer goals, Spanish newspapers and Polaroid cameras to take snapshots home.  “We assumed they’d be too tired to play, but surprisingly, we were wrong!” says Davis. 

In 2008, GCHC plans to expand the lay health program beyond diabetes to include two other chronic diseases.  Which two topics?  The workers themselves will decide.

Greene County Health Care, Inc. was the recipient of the 2007 Community TIEs Award for Evaluation through our Community Impact through Nonprofit Excellence focus area.