An alarming life expectancy statistic for Hispanic women in SC stirs a call for action | Opinion

Surely Thomas C. Barnwell Jr. wasn’t surprised to hear a local health care statistic that hushed the crowd at Hilton Head Island’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremony on Monday.

He’s 88 now, and his decades of activism trace the long and often slow march of progress on his native island.

His mother, Hannah White Barnwell, was the island’s first nurse long before there was a bridge, bringing her training from a nursing school for African Americans in Columbia back to her sandy, remote home with no doctors, no hospital.

Then, Barnwell was the first director of Beaufort Jasper Comprehensive Health Services, one of America’s earliest community health centers. It was established in 1970 to address children of Beaufort and Jasper counties infected with intestinal worms and other problems linked to poverty.

Barnwell testified on the jarring local conditions before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1968. And he met his wife, Susan, when she came to the Lowcountry to help fight the worm problem caused by shallow wells, a lack of plumbing, scant health care and poor hygiene.

So surely, Barnwell could feel each bump along this long march as he and Susan listened to the ceremony’s keynote speaker, Dr. Faith Polkey who is chief executive of the Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services. She’s the one who laid the jaw-dropping statistic on the audience, as stunning today as the thought of local children with worms.

“Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death,’ ” she said.

That was in 1966, and soon thereafter a small group of people from Hilton Head, Bluffton and St. Helena Island “got together to solve a problem — infections from Ascaris worms in children in the community.”

She credited Barnwell, Emory Campbell and Roland Gardner for getting a clinic started in Chelsea, with the credo “Health is a right, not a privilege.”

“With the support of the community, as well as federal, state and county funding, BJHCHS has been able to expand over the past 54 years to include 10 locations, 10 school-based health centers, and three mobile units,” Polkey said. “Services include adult medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYN, dental, pharmacy, nutrition, behavioral health and many other supportive services. We have been able to serve over 17,000 people every year in the three counties and beyond.”

Today, she said, Beaufort County is called the healthiest county in South Carolina.

But she shared data about Beaufort and Jasper counties from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control that show current health disparities often depend on race, ethnicity, gender, ZIP code or socioeconomic status. Life expectancy can vary by four years on Hilton Head Island, depending on where you live. Life expectancy for Black people on the island is a decade shorter than for white people, she said.

Then there was this.

“Most alarming to me was the median age of death among Hispanic men and women,” Polkey said of the 2023 data. “For men it was age 53 — and worse still, Hispanic women in Jasper County died at the median age of 44!

“That is exactly what MLK was talking about,” Polkey said. She added: “You can’t just let that sit there on a piece of paper.”

Causes for health disparities are varied and complex, Polkey said, and must be addressed by various entities including government, private citizens, businesses and health care providers. “It will take all of us working in different ways to make a difference,” Polkey said, “but if BJHCHS is any example of a few people making a difference, I know that we all can.”

Many things change, but one thing is the same today as when Hannah Barnwell went off to study nursing and when her son went off to rattle the cages in Congress. Somebody has to see something and do something.

“So I call upon you all to think about that thing that you can do to change our community,” Polkey said. “What issue has been bothering you for a while? Who can you partner with to make it happen?”

This story was originally published January 21, 2024 at 6:00 AM.