§1616l Community Health Aide Program

Summary

The Secretary, through the Service, must run a Community Health Aide Program in Alaska that trains Alaska Natives to work as health aides or community health practitioners. The program must use those aides to give health care, promote health, and prevent disease in rural village clinics. The program must also set up teleconferencing in clinics in or near those villages so aides can get remote help. The Service must use accredited trainers and a curriculum that mixes classroom learning with supervised hands-on work. Training must cover acute and emergency care, health promotion, disease prevention, and running clinic pharmacies, supplies, equipment, and facilities, and must support the health goals in section 1602(2). A Certification Board must certify trainees or people with equivalent experience. The Service must provide continuing education, close supervision, and regular review of aides’ work to keep quality high. Dental health aide therapists may do pulpal therapy (not pulpotomies on baby teeth) or adult tooth extractions only after a licensed dentist agrees it is a true emergency that cannot wait; they cannot do other oral or jaw surgeries, although simple extractions are not counted as oral surgery. The Secretary must set up a neutral panel (clinicians, economists, community practitioners, oral epidemiologists, and Alaska Natives) to study dental health aide therapist services, consult Alaska tribal organizations, and report results to the Secretary and to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Committee on Natural Resources. The Secretary may expand the program nationally but must not cut Alaska funding and must exclude dental therapist services except where a tribe or tribal organization outside Alaska chooses them in a State that allows those services; the Secretary must not fill a dentist vacancy with a dental health aide therapist. The program does not stop the Service, Indian tribes, or tribal organizations from using other federal programs.