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An appreciation for the state’s rural communities led to public health career
July 14, 2010
Amy Brock Martin
This is another in a series of reports on the people who have shaped the Arnold School of Public Health as it celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2010.
Eutawville is just a dot on the map of Orangeburg County, but it looms large in the mind of Arnold School researcher Dr. Amy Brock Martin.
“My heart and my burial plot are in Eutawville. My family roots are there. That’s home to me even though I’ve never lived there,” said Martin, deputy director of the S.C. Rural Health Research Center.
Her attachment for the rural community beside Lake Marion developed over the many summers and holidays she spent at her grandparents Betty and Garland Crump’s home.
It also was where her grandmother’s caring example led her to choose a career in public health.
Martin was a child when her grandfather came down with renal kidney disease thrusting Mrs. Crump into the role of caretaker/chauffeur for three trips a week to Orangeburg for her husband’s dialysis treatments.
Ms. Crump not only endured the visits for her spouse’s sake, but took care of the needs of neighbors who needed meds and other goods from the county seat 40 miles away.
When a heart attack claimed her grandmother in 1993, Martin was a student at USC, struggling to find a direction to her education. “Her death completely shook my orientation to the rest of the world,” Martin said.
With her grandmother’s example of service providing the guidance, Martin finished her undergraduate studies, majoring in psychology with a cognate in biology. At the same time, she devoted hours each week as a volunteer at Palmetto Baptist Hospital.
The volunteer work taught her a valuable lesson: that she didn’t need to provide clinical care to patients to have an impact on their lives -- she could make a difference by empowering people. It is where she first met a patient health educator, leading her to pursue a major in Health Promotion, Education and Behavior.
After earning her master’s degree from the then USC School of Public Health, she spotted an ad in the newspaper. Bamberg County Hospital needed a director of education.
“I was excited about the job interview because it was the perfect union of all my loves: working in a hospital setting as an educator in a rural setting,” she said.
Her Bamberg job left her with indelible memories about the face of life in rural South Carolina.
One recollection stands out: The van used to transport patients to the hospital’s mammogram clinic wasn’t available one day so “I decided to be a good Samaritan and drive one lady home in my car. I’d tucked away a bag of bath salts that we’d usually hand out to patients as a thank-you gift for using our hospital,” she said.
“I was feeling like a do-gooder until we reached the lady’s house. I’d never seen such poverty in my life. It was a cinderblock house with no glass in the windows. Only tarps covered the roof and the windows – and here I was sitting in my car with a gift bag of toiletries. What an humbling experience that was,” she said.
She remembers thinking: “This is great that I’m doing public health education but I think that I need to do more.”
Doing more came to mean moving back to Columbia where she became associate director of the State Office of Rural Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring equitable access to quality healthcare for all rural South Carolinians.
At the same time, she also worked as a program manager in the Office of Research and Statistics at the S.C. Budget and Control Board.
The government positions provided an opportunity to gain insights through research on the extent of rural health disparities in the state and to develop improved rural health delivery systems.
She married Gregg Martin in 2001 and joined the Arnold School’s Department of Health Services Policy and Management after earning her doctorate.
Soon after, she became deputy director of the S.C. Rural Health Research Center under the leadership of her longtime friend and mentor Dr. Jan Probst.
Her current assignment is studying inequities stemming from socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity and access to healthcare services.
Recently, she has been working with AccessHealthSC, a project of the S. C. Hospital Association. The project, which she described as “one of the most rewarding of my career,” has found her working with local communities around the state to improve access to care for uninsured populations. Part of her work involves creating health system profiles that describe the assets and vulnerabilities for disenfranchised populations in local healthcare systems.
Martin’s profiles will be used to develop networks across the state to improve access to care for people who are low-income and uninsured. The end result of the networks is to deliver healthcare services more efficiently and at lower cost.
No path is perfect, and Martin admitted she’s had some detours on the road to her current career status. However, she’s convinced God has been in charge at every turn.
And, of course, there’s no place like home for many people when they look at the people who have been their role models. Martin said she’s been blessed with the role models whom God has deliberately put in her life’s path, especially her parents Dianne and Jerry Brock.
