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Commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S., but many fishermen are used to working with limited health care. That’s why one mobile health clinic on the Texas Gulf Coast is providing fishermen. Many of them Vietnamese immigrants with free primary care right on the docks. Elizabeth Myong reports from Galveston.
ELIZABETH MYONG: Along the shore, water laps at docked shrimping boats. Seagulls cry out while circling overhead. Feet away from the water’s edge, nurse Martha Diaz kneels on a wooden dock as she examines open sores on a shrimper’s heel.
MARTHA DIAZ: OK. So I’m going to clean your foot and clean your wound, OK? And then we’re going to put a bandage back on it. And you’ll need to change it every week.
MYONG: A medical student translates in Vietnamese.
UNIDENTIFIED MEDICAL STUDENT: (Speaking Vietnamese).
MYONG: It’s noisy at UTHealth Houston’s Docside Clinics. Every month, shrimpers can get free checkups for issues like hypertension and diabetes, food, clothing and social and legal services. Shannon Guillot-Wright is a professor of occupational health at UTHealth Houston. She started the clinics over four years ago to help fishermen, many who are uninsured and have limited English proficiency.
SHANNON GUILLOT-WRIGHT: Felt like it was a population that was quite literally invisible.
MYONG: As health care costs skyrocket, the clinic’s work has become more critical. Last April, President Trump signed an executive order deregulating commercial fishing and weakening safety monitoring. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows commercial fishing has a fatality rate over 40 times the national average. Initially, Guillot-Wright says the clinic tried to address the slips, trips and falls that can result in fatalities. But Guillot-Wright says really listening to the fishermen helped earn their trust.
GUILLOT-WRIGHT: And many of them would talk about, look, I haven’t had access to a physician in 10 years.
MYONG: Sisters Cecile “CucHuyen” Roberts and Cuc Hoa Trieu are community health workers and translators who immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. in the ’80s.
CECILE ROBERTS: I know how to make them feel comfortable ’cause I’m, like, one of them.
MYONG: Roberts has helped one shrimper, H, get medical care. He asked to be identified only by his first initial because he’s in the process of renewing his permanent residency and fears jeopardizing his immigration status. Before the clinic started, H broke his pinky finger on the job and initially sought emergency care. But without health coverage, he missed follow-ups, which left his finger crooked at a 90-degree angle, but he’s used to experiencing far worse. On a nearby boat, a cable came loose and hit a fisherman.
H: Somebody – he dead. He dead the boat (ph).
MYONG: Kait Guild is with Harvard Medical School’s Mobile Health Map. She says mobile care can help rebuild trust with people outside the traditional health care system.
KAIT GUILD: It’s providing care in accessible spaces, places where underserved and marginalized community members and patients of all backgrounds feel safe.
MYONG: Guillot-Wright says the clinic aims to care for the people who are often forgotten.
GUILLOT-WRIGHT: We don’t always do the work thinking about where our food comes from.
MYONG: As the clinic winds down, the fisherman limps away with a newly bandaged foot.
For NPR News, I’m Elizabeth Myong in Galveston, Texas.
(SOUNDBITE OF J DILLA SONG, “SO FAR TO GO (FEAT. COMMON AND D’ANGELO”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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