Identifying and Providing Health Education Materials for Migrant Farmworkers

Migrant farmworkers face a host of different health issues and yet are the backbone of our food economy. In order to address some of the vast health disparities that exist for this population, partners from East Carolina University, NC State, and Student Action with Farmworkers worked together on a National Library of Medicine grant for three years. The main aims of the grant that the library was involved in included searching for and identifying health education materials for farmworkers, making them available online, and creating training materials on how to search for reliable health information online aimed at outreach workers or promotores. Other products included a mapping review of farmworker health in the literature which produced bibliographies of farmworker health research, digital literacy videos for farmworkers, and work with our partners produced videos and education materials on how to use TikTok for health outreach, getting hotspots and devices to migrant labor camps, and even a flipchart on helpful apps that can be used for outreach.

About the Speaker

Jamie Bloss, MLIS, AHIP is an associate professor at Laupus Health Sciences Library and the liaison librarian to the College of Allied Health Sciences and the School of Dental Medicine at East Carolina University. She also teaches online undergraduate information literacy courses as an adjunct instructor for Kent State University in Ohio. She has worked as an Emerging Technology Librarian at a public library, and as an academic librarian at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji before landing at East Carolina University in Eastern NC. Her interests include teaching information and digital literacy skills, evidence-based searching, and helping to reduce health disparities and the digital divide for migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families. She also takes part in systematic review research and conducts research that has examined authorship concerns among health sciences librarians. She hails from Cleveland, Ohio and currently lives in Farmville, North Carolina.

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