MACON – Dr. Jacob Warren, director of the Center for Rural Health and Health Disparities and associate professor in the Mercer University School of Medicine, was recently named to the Georgia Farmworker Health Program Governing Board.
The board oversees Georgia’s farmworker health initiatives funded by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. This includes overseeing funding directed toward migrant and seasonal farmworker health in Georgia, making recommendations about migrant health issues and promoting continuous quality improvement in migrant health care for the state.
The board falls under the Georgia Department of Community Health and is managed through Georgia’s State Office of Rural Health.
The Georgia Farmworker Health Program was created to improve the health status of Georgia’s migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families by providing cost effective and culturally appropriate health care, arranging for other levels of health care through collaboration and advocacy and working collaboratively with local organizations and groups.
The program provides primary healthcare services for 21 rural counties through six access point organizations located in Bainbridge, Pearson, Ellaville, Ellenton, Reidsville and Lake Park.
About the Mercer University School of Medicine (Macon, Savannah and Columbus)
Mercer University’s School of Medicine was established in 1982 to educate physicians and health professionals to meet the primary care and health care needs of rural and medically underserved areas of Georgia. Today, more than 60 percent of graduates currently practice in the state of Georgia, and of those, more than 80 percent are practicing in rural or medically underserved areas of Georgia. Mercer medical students benefit from a problem-based medical education program that provides early patient care experiences. Such an academic environment fosters the early development of clinical problem-solving and instills in each student an awareness of the place of the basic medical sciences in medical practice. The School opened a full four-year campus in Savannah in 2008 at Memorial University Medical Center. In 2012, the School began offering clinical education for third- and fourth-year medical students in Columbus. Following their second year, students participate in core clinical clerkships at the School’s primary teaching hospitals: Medical Center, Navicent Health in Macon; Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah; and The Medical Center and St. Francis Hospital in Columbus. The School also offers master’s degrees in family therapy, preclinical sciences and biomedical sciences.
