JESSIE: A lot of money goes into the training, and it's a good training, too. For us old timers they finally started what they call the clinical update. Every so often we'd go to -- it's like a refresher course. 

That helped me a lot on my charting.  That was my big -- Every evaluation they'd write on there, “Need to improve on your charting.” “Okay, so have someone come and teach me or send me somewhere to learn.” I still have trouble with that.

KAREN: So, when you first started, did you not -- charting is like keeping a patient's record. So when you first started -- ?

JESSIE: What you do for the patient, yeah.

KAREN: When you first started did you have to do all that, keeping track of everything?

JESSIE: No. To get paid at that time, when I first started, all we had to fill out was like a sheet of paper and you write down how many patients you saw and for what. And that was it.

KAREN: So, you didn't have to keep a chart on each patient?

JESSIE: No. No. We didn't do that much charting. Charting got to be -- It was a big thing for me, I mean. I always had problem with charting because they didn't stress it to us that much when we first started. Teaching like the SOAP, they called it.

KAREN: What's that?

JESSIE: Subject, Objective, Assessment, Plan. Subject is what the patient tells you. What you see, what you decide to do for them, the plan. I mean, what you decide it is and what you decide to do for them.

KAREN: The current situation with health aides who maybe don't stay on the job, they go through all that training and then they leave. Have you thought about what SEARHC (Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium) or places like that could do to help so the health aides stay longer?

JESSIE: I think they've done some of them, like increase their pay. Each time that they go through training they get a step increase. So, the pay has gotten a lot better then it was when we were working earlier.

And I mentioned earlier, that they at least let you go to session two before they'll put you on-call. And when they first put you on-call, they'll let another PA or health aide go on-call with you.

And then they'll be there with you to see the patient, and they'll kind of ween you I should say.  Then they'll call you -- put you on-call with the other person on-call with you only if you really need them.  So then, gradually let you go on your own.

KAREN: Like mentoring or job shadowing or something, they call it.

JESSIE: Hm, mm. That way it's not as scary as just plopping you there. The on-call, that's the one that's hard on most health aides.  This one that recently resigned, I believe that was the reason she resigned. She had a crazy on-call week, where she never even made it to go home hardly. So, it's too much away from her family. Had one of her children failing at school. It's just sometimes, it's just like that sometimes where you almost go crazy with the on-call. I remember I had one week of on-call with no call-back. That was sweet. I had no call-backs.

KAREN: So what does that mean, that you didn't have to go out and do any calls? Nobody called?

JESSIE: No, no one called. Everything was fine that week. But there's some weeks where you're at the clinic almost every minute it seems like. Just depends. There's some horrible things you have to deal with, too, with being on-call.