Military Medical Professionals Lead Relief Effort in Alabama

It didn't make headlines, but more than 250 U.S. military medical personnel quietly deployed into a stubborn pocket of poverty this month on a relief mission that spent two weeks treating people with little or no access to medical care.

Many of the 12,000 or so people treated by the medical specialists had chronic ailments such as hypertension and diabetes, or neglected health issues such as decaying teeth and vision problems. Access to healthcare has been elusive for the people of the region. Several told their caregivers in camouflage that they hadn't seen a doctor in decades nor ever visited a dentist.

This deployment is a heartwarming story about the generosity and sacrifice of Americans in uniform providing desperately needed medical care for people with few alternatives.

Sadly, the military did not have to leave the United States to provide these badly needed services. The patients all lived around Selma, Hayneville, and Demopolis in Alabama's impoverished Black Belt, which is named for the region's dark, fertile soil.

For a third straight year military medical personnel including physicians, nurses, dentists, optometrists, and even a veterinarian—from the reserve ranks of the Air Force, Army, Navy, and National Guard—came from all over the nation to provide the care that the Department of Defense calls Innovative Readiness Training, or IRT.

"It's a win-win for us and the military," says Chris Masingill, federal co-chair of the Delta Regional Authority, a joint federal-state board that promotes economic development in the eight-state area. "Our part of the world is one of the most economically distressed areas of the country and you can add on top of that our poor health attainment issues and our medically underserved population that we have in the Delta region, Masingill says.

"The military gets to put in place the procedures and plans that it would use during a time of natural disaster or war. This is an opportunity for them to test their supply chain, medical training, staffing levels, logistics, you name it. They run the gauntlet in those two weeks that they are setting up their field medical units in our part of the world."

Masingill says the military has estimated that it provided about $3 million in free medical care during the two-week mission. "The military folks absolutely love this. Instead of going overseas to do their two weeks of annual training they can do it right here at home and the benefit is enormous," he says.

For many of the military medical providers, a trip to the Delta can be illuminating.
"Some of the physicians and particularly the dentists who practice in more affluent areas in their private practices, when they participated in our IRT program their reaction is 'Wow!'" Massingill says.

"You hear about it. You read about it. People tell you about it. But now they've seen the kind of poverty that has an impact on somebody's oral health and it is pretty tremendous. We had one case where every tooth in that individual's mouth was extracted. That is something you don't see every day."

IRT has been operating in the Delta since 2009. The training program was in Mississippi and Arkansas in previous years. Massingill says IRT looks to expand in 2013 and beyond to include multiple missions simultaneously in several Delta states in great part because of the demand for care.

"It affirms in my mind how important it is that we address the issue of affordable accessible quality healthcare in our part of the world, particularly in areas that are economically distressed and medically underserved," he says.

"You can see the sheer numbers of people and the stories that come out when they go through their IRT program and have the opportunity to have their eyes checked or have a cavity filled or see a physician for hypertensions or diabetes, which are big issues in our part of the world."

With a mixture of pride, appreciation, and frustration, Massingill laments that it take a military exercise to bring quality healthcare to the nation's poorest regions.

"We still suffer tremendously from the issue of affordable accessible quality healthcare in rural America and particularly in the Delta region," Massingill says. "If we don't address these issues it impacts our ability to be competitive and maintain strong communities and strong economies."

"You cannot have a healthy workforce without a healthy community," he says. "And there are many people, many Americans in our part of the world that simply cannot afford or have the ability to access quality healthcare."