South Georgia Farmworker Health Project

This project has been my "baby." It began with a coffee shop discussion with a Physician Assistant (PA) student and developed into faculty approving a pilot project of 4 PT students and a supervising PT offering pro bono care to migrant farmworkers and their families in South Georgia. The service-learning project development was hard work; I spent hours writing a proposal for faculty members, arranging logistics with Emory's PA program, creating student participant applications and a selection rubric, crafting a budget, raising money through bake sales, coordinating a clothing drive for the farmworkers, and, of course, the direct patient treatment itself. Our PT team joined the pre-existing project and worked alongside PA students and faculty for 3 days. We set up make-shift clinics with a canopy, some mats, a card table, and lots of borrowed Emory Healthcare sheets. Keep in mind, this was the beginning of June in South Georgia (Valdosta, and surrounding small towns), so heat was definitely a factor. We treated patients' musculoskeletal complaints at labor camps, county health departments, and low-income apartment complexes. Primarily our treatments involved injury to the low back...we even led "back" classes while patients waited in line for their general health check-up. Education, exercises, and massage (soft tissue manipulation) were common interventions we used. We bilingual handouts specific to farmworker injuries. After our final day of clinics, we drove 4 hours back to Atlanta, grabbed a quick lunch, and took a practical exam!

We wrote summaries of our experiences on the South Georgia Farmworker Health Project. This narrative was published in two PT newsletters; both at the state and national level. Most recently, my group submitted an abstract to present at a National PT Conference; our presentation was selected, so we will travel to San Antonio in June to describe Emory's interdisciplinary service-learning project.