Every summer, more than 70 faculty and students from colleges throughout Georgia embark on a two-week medical trip with the Farm Worker Family Health Program (FWFHP) to Moultrie, Georgia where they provide health care services to migrant farm workers and their families.
Migrant farm workers have a difficult time affording health care services and work in extreme environments that put them at risk for health problems. The FWFHP is designed to increase accessible medical services to migrant farm worker families.
During the two-week FWFHP summer trip, the team provides additional medical support to the Ellenton Clinic. With summer being their busiest time of year, the team contributes to the clinics ability to provide needed services and outreach. The team consists of students and faculty from schools of nursing, physical therapy, dental hygiene and psychology students from Georgia State. 
During their intense two-week experience, the team delivered such services as physical exams, health education, physical therapy, and dental care to 771 children and adults in the FWFHP. Mornings were spent in summer school, where they saw 226 children conducting services like well-child exams and school readiness physicals. In the evenings after the workers finished tending the crops, the team would set up health camps in fields or packing sheds to care for the workers. The camps would begin around 5:00 and wouldn’t end until everyone had been treated, sometimes close to midnight.
To assist them in their medical work, they came to MedShare for medical supplies such as bandages, gloves and plastic basins for foot care. The team made good use out of the ace bandages to treat the many musculoskeletal problems that the farm workers have from the hard labor of farm work.
“The blue basins we collected from MedShare were a huge help, because one of the biggest services was the foot health station. Many of the farm workers are working in environments where they are suppceptible to foot fungus and infections that must be treated,” said Ann Connor, a faculty Nurse Practitioner at Emory on the team.
This is the 16th year for the program, and FWFHP Director Dr. Judith Wold expressed that the supplies contributed from MedShare enable the team to deliver better care to the people in this underserved population.
