Gloria Park, Transcript Section 13

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Gloria Park,
Transcript Section 13

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KAREN: So out of -- up until 1985, did you continue to have contact with the health aides? By then it was quite a --

DR. PARK: Quite a --

KAREN: -- formalized program?

DR. PARK: Yeah, by then, it was very formalized. And yeah, well, considering. So I was more assigning other people groups and villages. You know, like one would visit the Kodiak area villages, and one the Iliamna, one the Aleutians.

And then I was doing some of the early writing and helping with manuals as far as the health aide program.

KAREN: So you weren't --

DR. PARK: And worked in clinic half time.

KAREN: So you were no longer being the one on the telephone talking directly to the health aides.

DR. PARK: Very little.

KAREN: -- by then?

DR. PARK: Yeah.

KAREN: Okay. As a physician, what do you think about this type of a program where you have a local person delivering the medical care instead of a doctor doing it?

DR. PARK: Well, you have to have somebody. And you're never going to have the population to have physicians out on -- and living there. So you've got to train aides to help.

And I've -- I strongly believe, too, that the current plans for a dental aide type program is -- is warranted. You don't have enough dentists. And even way back, you know, when I was in a village and they said, oh, so and so needs a tooth pulled, I didn't have that background. So I would immediately say, if I wasn't here, who would pull the tooth?

And there was someone usually in each of the bigger villages that had scrounged a few instruments when somebody came by and said, well, can you leave this or that so I can do it. And that's the way they were learning.
And so I would -- I'd -- I pulled two or three on trips, but usually there was someone that knew and had done it. And they had already learned how to do it. So...

And the same way with midwives, people would step forward frequently, women whose mothers had been midwives, so to speak. Some of them didn't use that term.

KAREN: Right.

DR. PARK: And so there's usually someone who had delivered babies. There's usually someone who had pulled teeth.

And it got so that people that were helping with eye clinics had learned a lot about what to do about glasses. And there's a little more technique there, but they had a little bit of information. And so that's where the basic programs all developed. So...

KAREN: And do you think that the program has been a success?

DR. PARK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Just -- just the -- being able to talk to people in the village who had a little experience or training on the radio phone calls, and then when radios became obsolete or went by phones, so. Yeah.

KAREN: What about issues of confidentiality?

DR. PARK: Pardon?

KAREN: Confidentiality and privacy, how was that handled?

DR. PARK: Sometimes with some things, they wouldn't ask -- we wouldn't ask the patient's name. Or the -- where the health aide would say, I can't give you that. But -- especially if they were talking about venereal disease. Because anyone could listen in on the radio calls that had a radio. And -- and a lot of them did. And used them, of course, with ships and fishing season and -- and travelling.

But the big old -- the old radios were pretty sizable. But there was -- unless you were pretty careful, there was hardly -- you know, there were a lot of things were not confidential. Nobody thought about it initially, I don't think. They just accepted it.

KAREN: It sounds like you must have been faced with some difficult cases or circumstances. How did you find the strength and courage to do some of those things? It sounds like you weren't afraid and you just did it.

DR. PARK: Well, we just sort of thought that that's what we had to do. Yeah. There wasn't anybody else to call on. But there again, it was so obvious we needed more and more in the way of training than going back to the old manual. The teachers who were reluctant to get into it, too.