A Conversation with the Honorable Dr. Charles Grim

TC:  Do you think there are enough American Indian/Alaska Native students or kids out there thinking about careers in medicine?

CG:  Well, the short answer's probably no. Let me say what we're trying to do to deal with that. Right now at our agency, 86 percent of the staff is Indian. That's when you take a look at overall staffing. If you take out the professionals, because there are not a lot of Indian professionals in a lot of the professions, then our staffing numbers jump up to around 88 percent, I think. So you can see a little differential there when you leave all the professionals in.

Back in 1981, we only had 16 percent of our professionals - and I'm talking physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, optometrists - the full spectrum of sort of health professionals - we only had 16 percent of our professional staff that were Indian. And today, we have 36 percent of our professional staff that are Indian. And so, that's a 20 percent increase over that period, and over that time, our total provider staff has only increased 51 percent. So when you do all the ratios, actually the Indian provider staff has increased by 230 percent. So we've been making headway, and we've been doing it by a number of things.

Part of our budget in our program, approximately $30 million of our budget goes toward scholarships to Indian students in both the pre-professions - kind of the undergraduate college getting them ready for professional school - and the professional schools themselves. And with that scholarship comes an obligation to serve back in the agency. We also do loan repayment. And that's not necessarily just to Indian students; that's to help us with recruitment and retention, you know, in hard-to-fill sites. But we also have a program called "In Med" that we do with several universities out there, and it basically stands for "Indians into Medicine." We put monies into certain colleges that are in states that have large Indian populations to help us recruit more Indian kids into college and into the health professions.

Then we also have extern programs that we do with a number of the different professions that we employ, where we try to certainly encourage Indian students that might be in those programs. But really any student can work with our programs in different parts of the country in an externship setting in hopes that they will really enjoy the environment and the type of care we provide, and come to work for us. Also, we really have partnerships with a lot of the Indian student organizations out there. So we try to do everything we can to encourage students to get into the professions.