A Medicine Warrior: Dr. David Baines

TC:  What about the village health aides, now? How do they fit into the picture that you're speaking of, and do you assist them?

DB:  The health aides run their clinics, they're not nurses or docs, but they have some training. They have like three or four different levels that they can be. And they do actually an outstanding job out there in the villages with such little training and so little resources. But what they do is when they're out there by themselves if they have a patient and they need to speak to a physician, they fax the encounter form into Bethel. Each pod in Bethel has a number of villages, so it goes to the pod that's used to working with that village. So then that day there's one of those health providers, maybe a PA or a physician, assigned what they call radio traffic because in the old days it was a HAM radio, but now it's faxes and telephones, but they still call it radio traffic. So somebody's designated to do radio traffic that day and they just keep picking up the faxes and phoning the villages and talking to them. A lot of times they just want a confirmation that they're doing the right thing. Sometimes it's a real emergency, and somebody's having a chest pain or wrecked on a four-wheeler and has multiple injuries. And that's when they send out the plane to go get them. They do a great job; those health aides are just awesome.

TC:  Now is there a relationship with telemedicine activities and the hospital that you're at, and how do you see the need for that for the future?

DB:  Most of the villages are tied to the native hospitals, either the regional ones like Bethel or Kotzebue, Barrow, and then some of them are tied directly to the native hospital in Anchorage. The non-native villages, as far as I know, haven't gone after that aspect of it, or maybe the money's not available to them, but between the state and feds they've put a lot of money into telemedicine. They have a thing where they can do an EKG and transmit it. They have a camera that can transmit images of like, say a rash or something. They have an ear thing that can be used to transmit an image. I think some of the sub-regional clinics even have like x-ray capability where they can digitally transmit an x-ray film.