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Written by: Judy Cervantes-Connell, Health Outreach Partners, Project Manager
Health Outreach Partners (HOP) is pleased to announce the release of its fourth national needs assessment about farmworker health outreach. This report, published in May 2010 and titled Breaking Down the Barriers: A National Needs Assessment on Farmworker Health Outreach, provides a compelling summary of national data focused solely on farmworker outreach programs and the farmworker communities they serve. This is the only project of its kind that provides a national snapshot on the needs of farmworker health outreach programs. 
The study design, approved by an institutional review board (IRB), included a research framework based on the use of five data collection methodologies to generate high-quality data for this project. Additionally, HOP secured the participation of key audiences consisting of health care administrators, outreach managers, frontline outreach staff, and farmworkers throughout all regions of the United States. These individuals provided HOP with insight and data to more thoroughly understand important farmworker health outreach themes like farmworker access to care, health outreach and enabling services, outreach funding, needs assessments and evaluation data, cultural competency, and community collaboration and coalition building.
HOP believes that health professionals serving farmworkers in a rural area will find this report to be an invaluable asset for their organizations as well as their outreach programs. The findings of this research provides the migrant health community with information to better understand how farmworkers are commonly reached, as well as what strategies can be created to improve health access and decrease health disparities among the nearly three million migrant and seasonal farmworkers primarily based in rural America. Organizations can also utilize data in HOP’s national outreach assessment to compare their health outreach program with a nationwide average. Moreover, this research could also be used for reporting purposes, funding proposals, and planning documents.
While far from a comprehensive overview, the following are a few of the significant key findings that can be found in HOP’s national needs assessment report:
- Most migrant health professionals confirmed that farmworkers or their family members work in labor sectors other than agriculture (n=101). The five most common labor sectors are landscaping (71%), construction (64%), restaurant work (57%), dairy farming (48%), and greenhouses (43%).
- Migrant health professionals revealed the top farmworker barriers to health care to be lack of transportation (67%), lack of knowledge of available services (58%), cost of health care services (48%), lack of insurance (35%), and lack of comfort with health care services/facilities (22%) (n=100).
- Fear due to immigration and discrimination play a pivotal role in preventing farmworkers from accessing health care services. A large majority of migrant health professionals, farmworkers parents, and health center administrators indicated that lack of legal documentation status contributes to the fear felt by farmworkers and their families.
- Farmworker parents expressed a need for more information and education within their communities, particularly on the topics of pesticide exposure, legal services, health system navigation, and managing chronic disease.
- In 2007, health centers spent an average of $1.3 million on enabling services. Health centers spent about $55 per user for enabling services.
- Migrant health professionals indicated that they balance competing responsibilities inside and outside the clinic setting. Although interpretation is an invaluable service, it was noted by migrant health professionals that this demand could interfere with outreach staff’s ability to fulfill other essential community-based activities with the farmworker community.
- The most frequent challenges when collecting data for outreach programs were reported to be the lack of internal resources such as time (55%), funding (44%), and staff (42%) (n=95).
- Migrant health professionals reported a scarcity of health clinic staff who can respond to the language needs of indigenous farmworker populations who do not speak English or Spanish. Mixtec is the third-most reported language among farmworker patients and their families.
- According to health center administrators and migrant health professionals, some challenges in working with community partners include difficulties in defining distinct scopes of work, lack of language capacity, and improper or inadequate response to referrals.
In direct response to the findings of the report, HOP also developed a set of recommendations to address the various needs identified in this research project. The recommendations are tailored for funders/policymakers, farmworker advocates, and HOP itself. They focus on four key themes: fear, transportation, education and information sharing, and data. HOP believes the recommendations can inspire and motivate target audiences to take action in increasing farmworker access to care and reducing health disparities experienced by this special population. A collaborative response is one of the few ways to guarantee farmworker outreach programs, as well as the farmworker population, are having all of their needs addressed.
In short, if your organization has a farmworker outreach program, then HOP encourages you to please visit www.outreach-partners.org to obtain a free PDF copy of HOP’s Breaking Down the Barriers: A National Needs Assessment on Farmworker Health Outreach. A more comprehensive and in-depth analysis on the needs of farmworkers and farmworker outreach programs in the U.S. can be found in this report.
About the Author:
Judy joined HOP as a Project Manager in August 2006. She brings years of experience in public health within both rural and urban environments, including health education and outreach, policy advocacy, community organizing, and coalition building. Before working with HOP, she coordinated a tobacco-control policy campaign in San Francisco, managed the 5 a Day social marketing campaign targeting predominantly Latino farmworkers and their children on the Central Coast of California, and led a childhood immunization outreach program within the Mission District of San Francisco. Judy received her undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and earned her MPH from San Francisco State University.
Comments or feedback? Email us at advocate@csrha.org.
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