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“We’re not a young group,” said Audrey Powell, describing her team of nurses set up at the entrance to the Blue Grass South Stockyard on sale day last Thursday. Young or not, the nurses seemed right at home with the buyers and sellers filing in for the weekly auction. This wasn’t your usual office visit crowd; there was mud on their boots and sweat on their shirts, but many stopped to take advantage of the free medical services that Ephraim McDowell Community Outreach offers on a monthly basis at the stockyard.

Powell, Director of Community Outreach at Ephraim McDowell, said that these are the kind of guys who don’t make regular doctor visits, and that’s why her team was there.

“Thirty-eight percent of the people we see don’t have a family doctor, and an incredibly high percentage of them haven’t seen a doctor in five years,” she said.

The first place the Community Outreach nurses ever visited was the Boyle County Stockyard and the results were eye-opening. “We took student nurses to the first outreach and it was really an experience for them.”

Realizing that there was a very large underserved population in their service area, the Community Outreach team began looking for concentrations of high risk people to serve. Area stockyards were an obvious choice but there were many others. “We’ve been to lumberyards, anyplace where there are out-of-doors workers,” Powell said.

One of the most important services Community Outreach offers is screening for skin cancer. When screening farmers for sun damage, referral rates are as high as 40 percent.

Screening for skin cancer isn’t the only service offered; every month when they visit the stockyard they offer a different set of services so that over a year a visitor could receive screenings for blood pressure, heart disease, blood sugar and cholesterol. Since flu season began, Community Outreach has administered 5,000 free H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccines.

“Many of the people we see get no kind of preventative care; they only go to the doctor when they are already sick,” Powell said. In some cases the preventative screening has had an immediate lifesaving effect. “We have transported people directly from the stockyard to the emergency room,” Powell said.

Ephraim McDowell’s Community Outreach doesn’t focus only on adults; many children in Lincoln and in surrounding counties don’t see a doctor regularly either.

The Outreach team routinely visits the county’s elementary schools and offers a wide range of services from charting body mass indices to screening for at-risk behaviors.

They also have provided peak flow meters to 300 students in Lincoln who suffer from asthma as part of an asthma management education program.

“Stress is a leading contributor to heart disease,” Powell said, so they also offer screenings to teachers, bus drivers and bus monitors. All of this free of charge.

If miles driven can be used as a measure of dedication to serving the community, Powell and her team of nurses surely pass the test; their van has 178,000 miles on it. “We get around,” Powell smilingly acknowledged.

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