Pesticides and other chemicals, contaminated drinking water, substandard living conditions and lack of hand washing and sanitation facilities in the fields create and contribute to serious health risks to hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and their families. Farmworkers in the US suffer thousands of agricultural related injuries each year. The children of farmworkers are also no less vulnerable to these occupational and environmental risks.
To address these occupational and environmental health (EOH) issues, MCN is engaged in a nation-wide environmental and occupational health initiative focused on training and equipping healthcare providers, healthcare organizations and key stakeholders to improve the recognition, management and prevention of environmental and occupational injuries and illnesses among populations at risk for overexposure.

Integrating EOH Into Primary Care

MCN is working to assist frontline providers to integrate occupational and environmental health practices into primary care to strengthen the quality of care and meet the unique healthcare needs of the migrant population. MCN recognizes that migrant clinicians, like the majority of primary healthcare providers, generally do not bring an occupational and environmental health perspective to their work.  MCN focuses on feasible changes in clinical practices to improve the recognition and management of environmental and occupational exposures and injuries. This is done through partnerships with Migrant and Community Health Centers and involves on-site clinical training, the provision of resources and technical assistance and peer-to-peer networking between frontline providers and occupational and environmental medicine specialists.

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  Between 2006 and 2011, MCN established 10 model environmental and occupational programs in health centers and clinics across this US. These programs systematically demonstrate:

• changes in clinical systems including intake, screening, outreach and education;
• primary care providers’ willingness to acknowledge and address occupational injury and exposure which leads to improved patient care;
• new linkages between health centers and clinicians and the agricultural workplace; and
• connections between primary care providers and pesticide experts and OEM specialists.

MCN’s efforts in environmental and occupational health also involve the development and distribution of clinical and patient resources, training of clinicians and stakeholders through webinars, conferences and onsite workshops, and extensive partnerships with organizations having expertise in pesticides, occupational and environmental medicine and agricultural medicine. MCN has developed a number of patient education materials and training products for lay health educators (promotores de salud) to educate farmworkers about the risks from pesticide exposure and ways to protect themselves and their families and distributes thousands of these resources each year.

MCN’s EOH efforts are guided by an expert advisory committee and a largely supported through a cooperative agreement with the US Environmental Protection Agency as part of their National Strategies for Health Care Providers: Pesticide Initiative.