MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY - The county's agricultural service board (ASB) has been given an update on an agricultural-based program designed to protect and improve the health of members of the farming community.
Jordan Jensen, executive director of Farm Safety Centre, spoke with members of the ASB board at the board’s Dec. 13 regularly scheduled meeting.
During his talk, Jensen outlined ongoing work designed to help farmers and ranchers monitor and improve their physical and mental well-being.
The Rural Health Initiative is a multi-stakeholder program now underway in rural Alberta, he said.
“The way it works is we have a team of registered nurses who travel across the province with us,” said Jensen. “We partner with counties, ag societies, municipalities, Hutterite colonies, family farms and others. We show up at their venue or their office or wherever, and we do health assessments for people that have registered ahead of time.”
Local municipalities such as Mountain View County can schedule program workshops for residents.
Participants receive a comprehensive assessment, including an examination of things such as physical and mental health, blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
“We help you identify if there is anything that might be outside the normal range,” he said.
Farm Safety Centre is involved in the initiative for several reasons, he said.
“Farmers generally tend to take better care of their land, their livestock and their machinery than they do themselves,” he said. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to take care of your land, livestock and machinery, but what we are hoping to do with this program is to change the perspective of the farmer a little bit and to see that the human resource is just as important as any other resource on the farm.”
Rural populations in general are at a disadvantage when it comes to health care, he said.
“They are further away from hospitals, from ambulances, and they are exposed to things that city people aren’t exposed to,” he said. “There are a whole bunch of different diseases or virus that you can get, things that are really only found in farming or rural populations that are out of the metropolitan centre and with these unique challenges is a decreased life expectancy.
“So what we are tying to do is help people identify if there is something in their health that is outside the normal range. Maybe they have high levels of anxiety, maybe it’s depression, maybe their blood sugar is higher than it should be.
“These are all things that we will assess and identify what might need improvement. We will refer them to their family physician if that needs to be the case. We’ve done lots of referrals.”
So far, 140 workshops under the initiative have been held in the province, he said.
“About 1,400 people have participated in the program since 2014,” he said. “We had lots of people come back for follow up workshops and they’ve been surprised to learn that they quality of life has improved because of the changes that they have made.
“Many people will see improvements from year to year and the quality of their lives will improve hand in hand with that.”
ASB members accepted Jensen’s report as information.
