Dr. Michael Carroll, Transcript Section 4

Community Health Aide Program Project Jukebox

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KAREN: So why don't you talk a little bit about how you interacted with the health aides and communicating with them in the villages and how that all worked.

DR. CARROLL: So there were two ways that you would deal with the health aides. One was when you would go out to do the village for clinics.

And generally speaking, one of the physicians at the hospital in Tanana, especially in the wintertime, not so much in the summer, but in the wintertime would be visiting one or two villages and spend anywhere from one to three days in a village doing things like school exams, pap smears, dental extractions, eye refractions, and, you know, general medical sick call.

At that time, the health aide was the eminent personality that would help to organize that, and would assist you in those village field clinics.

A few of the villages actually had real freestanding buildings and clinics and actually had some electricity. In some cases we would utilize, you know, a storeroom or a coat room in the schools.

Sometimes in some villages, we would put a sheet up across part of the village buildings that may be used for public functions, and so you would have a sheet up in one corner and you'd have people sitting on benches that would be brought in. And I can remember having clinics, doing pap smears and eye refractions with a Coleman lantern because there was no electricity in the village.

And so you do that on a fairly regular basis to try to -- to get some of the preventative things to -- to the villages. And as I say, pull teeth and eye refractions because dental care was not very available to even the children at that point in time.

I mean, they did have a dentist who would perhaps come once a year, but the dentists were always overwhelmed with the amount of work that had to be done and never had enough time.

So that was how you would get to know the health aides personally and through firsthand assistance.

The other way was through communications over the very, very limited systems that existed. There were several villages like Galena and Fort Yukon that had telephones.

Most villages did not have electricity and some only had electricity when the schools were in existence. And -- and the communications were through single-sideband radios. When school was out, the power was off, there may be weeks during the summer that they didn't even have single-sideband radios, so you wouldn't even have any communication with the village or the village health aide.

What we tended to do is usually at a set time every day, would go into the radio room at the hospital, and commence radio traffic, I think it was probably one o'clock, and you'd go down the list starting with the As and finishing at the bottom of the alphabet, and call each village health aide with a village name and the call letters for the village on the single-sideband radio.

And there were some days, especially in the summertime, because the schools were out, the way the sun was, and the antennas in the villages and in Tanana that you wouldn't be able to reach for weeks at a time. And you'd go through the list, you'd usually call them twice, and if they didn't, go on to the next village.

And then at the end, ask for any more radio traffic, and once that was finished, sign off. And usually that could be accomplished in between 30 and 60 minutes.

KAREN: Uh-hum. Now, is a single-sideband radio like a CB radio?

DR. CARROLL: No, CBs would be a very, very short wave. This was actually -- these were shortwave radios that were, you know, fairly large, probably, you know, 24 by 24 inches across.

KAREN: Uh-hum.

DR. CARROLL: We had a large antenna that was probably 50 feet in the air that was out in the back of the hospital. And ideally, the villages would have the same antennas.

So, you know, a CB radio has a pretty short distance of transmission.

Theoretically, these had transmission distances of more than 200 miles because we really were talking about an area that the Tanana Hospital serviced at -- it was about the size of the state of Montana.

KAREN: Yeah.

DR. CARROLL: So from the Eagle, which was over close to the Canadian border to the east, to Kaltag, which was just maybe 30 miles from the Bering Sea. So you know, it's the breadth was really quite significant.