When COVID swept into eastern North Carolina (ENC) in the spring of 2020, our Affordable Care Act (ACA) Navigators were already regularly meeting with temporary farmworkers to encourage them and their families to sign up for ACA health-insurance plans. That meant our bilingual Navigators were not only visiting popular tiendas, but also the ENC farms where field-workers in the United States on H-2A visas were employed.
Early COVID-education outreach to the ENC temporary-farmworker community.
The Access East (AE) Farmworker Health Program grew out of our Navigators' recognizing that these farmworkers, ranging in age from 18 to sometimes upwards of 50, and who lived in extremely close quarters in dormitory-style camps, were especially vulnerable to the spread of the potentially deadly virus.
Navigators began coordinating COVID testing in the temporary-worker camps, in close collaboration with the Vass-N.C.-based NC Growers Association and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS) NC Farmworker Health Program, as well as with other state agencies and regional health providers. This would soon blossom into COVID-vaccination clinics at the camps, and to assisting farm owners in keeping COVID-positive workers out of the general population until those workers were no longer contagious.
During the height of COVID, the AE Farmworker Health Program was helping 80-100 temporary farmworkers get vaccinated per day.
By the time the national COVID emergency was finally passing, it had become clear just how many other services were badly needed to help temporary farmworkers stay healthier in the isolated situations in which they lived and worked.
Juan Allen, a community coordinator with the AE Farmworker Health Program, teaching life-saving CPR and wound-care skills to temporary workers on ENC farms.
Juan Allen, a community coordinator with the AE Farmworker Health Program, and the leading driver behind its success, has noted that in 2023 alone, three farmworkers died from heat stroke, while another passed away in the fields following a heart attack, with no one nearby knowing CPR to try to help to save him.
One of the men who succumbed to heatstroke was a 30-year-old farmworker from Guanajuato, Mexico, who died early that September while harvesting sweet potatoes in a Nash County field. He had been on the job for less than two weeks.
During growing season, Juan now leads training sessions at the local camps not only on the prevention of heat stroke and heat exhaustion, but also in hands-only CPR.
Since December 2024, Juan has led CPR training with more than 5,000 people, roughly 90 percent being farmworkers, the other 10 percent being the growers.
Training sessions have grown to include clinics in basic wound-care, teaching not only emergency bandaging, but even how to apply tourniquets in extreme-bleeding situations.
The AE Farmworker Health Program has also been able to provide some skin-cancer testing, dental cleanings and mental health support, as well as training in recognizing an opioid overdose (and how and when to administer Narcan to reverse the effects), along with such farm-specific concerns as tobacco sickness.
"Pretty much anything we can get them that they need," Juan said.
For More Information
Contact Juan Allen, Access East Community Coordinator and Certified Marketplace Navigator, at Juan.Allent@AccessEast.org, or (252) 402-4370.