Gloria Park, Transcript Section 3

Community Health Aide Program Project Jukebox

Gloria Park,
Transcript Section 3

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KAREN: As I said, Walter Johnson told me that you were involved in this pilot project in the -- what, 1964?

DR. PARK: Well, when we -- when I came up here in '57.

KAREN: Uh-hum.

DR. PARK: Brand new, didn't know what -- what I was getting into at all. There were only about, gee, maybe ten of us in the old hospital, ten physicians. And two dentists.

And -- and it was one of those things you had to gradually develop something, and one of the -- and of course, they had radio, phone patch with the bigger villages. I don't remember having phone service anywhere. It was the old radio.

And we used to take turns taking radio call. And then as phones were developed in the bigger villages, then we -- one of us, which was usually me and the outpatient department, took the phone calls from the villages. And also did the radio phone patch.

And our first -- the first thing I wanted to do was find a person in each village to predominantly make the phone call so that we got more acquainted. And of course, the village wanted to do that, as well.

And like you say, a lot of the original health aides, and I don't remember whether we ever -- we even used that term, but we used it pretty early on.
And usually there was a midwife in the -- at least in the bigger villages. And health aide in the smaller, and a lot of them had been the old chemo health aides. And it was all voluntary to begin with.

KAREN: So what are the chemo aides?

DR. PARK: Oh. The chemotherapy for tuberculosis. Both active cases and preventative type. And that program was one -- run mainly by the Health Department, the State Health Department.

KAREN: It wasn't the Indian Health Service?

DR. PARK: No.

KAREN: Okay. So --

DR. PARK: And so the chemo aides worked with the Public Health nurses. And they traveled.

And like with us, there -- there wasn't enough -- there wasn't enough Public Health nurses to cover all of the villages very often. You know. Once or twice a year.

And so either an ex-midwife or a -- or as the chemotherapy program began to wane, and they had -- that was when they were testing INH all over the country, Isomyosin.

KAREN: I'm not remembering that.

DR. PARK: It was a TB medicine. So...

KAREN: So they were testing it to see its effectiveness?

DR. PARK: They had -- they had proved in the laboratory that it was, so it was being used wherever there were hot spots of -- of a lot of TB.

KAREN: What exactly did the chemo aides do? Did they -- they provided TB shots or --

DR. PARK: No. Primarily were just making house visits to keep people on their treatment, encouraging them to take the pills and -- I've forgotten what the -- primarily, it was -- I can't think of the other one. Anyway --

KAREN: Were those -- were those paid positions, those chemotherapy aides?

DR. PARK: I don't know.

KAREN: Oh, okay.

DR. PARK: I kind of think they might have been paid a little, but then a lot of them may have just been volunteer.

And -- and then from that, some of them went on to be midwives, some of them did health aide, some did both.