‘Pathways Into Health’
UND Selected as Test Site for National Effort to Improve Native American Health
“Definitely.”
This is Altanta Begay’s swift, affirming answer when asked if she would eventually like to return to her home community to tend to the health care needs of other Navajo Indians in Arizona.
“I am close to home and close to my family,” she says of her hometown, Page, AZ. “We have a lot of elderly where I live. It’s important for the Navajos to take care of the elderly.”
Pathways Into Health is an exciting new collaborative of tribes, tribal communities, universities, tribal colleges and the Indian Health Service focused on the development of professional health education for American Indians and Alaska Natives offered through culturally reinforcing distance education. This program has a significant potential to improve the health, health care and health education in Indian communities.
We are honored to be a partner with the outstanding programs at UND and are especially pleased to have the leadership of the CLS program as we develop nationally available programs for Native Americans. Our first on-site student at UND, Atlanta Begay, is an example of the outstanding quality students we are working with UND and other universities and tribal colleges to develop. |
James Galloway, M.D.,
F.A.C.P., F.A.C.C.
Director, Native American Cardiology Program
Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Public Health
University of Arizona |
Traditionally, her people led a healthy lifestyle, she says, noting that her great-grandmother, who’s over 100, is “healthy as a horse.” In the past, elders in her family looked after a lot of sheep, so were “walking around constantly”; their diet consisted of corn, grains and wild potatoes, onions and tea.
As lifestyles have changed, Begay sees more diabetes and heart disease among Navajo people, and she wants to be part of improving their health.
“It’s really important to me to study these changes and try to convince people to live the way our grandmothers did,” she says.
Begay, who is working on a bachelor’s degree in clinical laboratory science (CLS) at the UND medical school, is the first student to participate in Pathways Into Health, a national project funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Indian Health Service. The CLS program, the pilot program of Pathways Into Health, is being watched closely as a model for encouraging Native Americans to enter health professions using distance education.
Begay has fit most of her studies around her work as a medical technologist at Tuba City, AZ, but much has been taken on-line, through distance education. She plans to return to Tuba City for her clinical rotations and complete her degree by the spring of 2007. She already holds a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Northern Arizona University.
With her sights set beyond the laboratory, she hopes to go on to medical school, possibly in North Dakota (“It’s a pretty nice place, I’d like to come back here”) or closer to home in Arizona, California or Nevada. She is considering family medicine, pathology or pediatrics as possible career choices.
She believes her CLS degree will provide an excellent foundation for the study of medicine.
“I think it’ll help a lot,” she says. “Every (test) the physician would order - we have to know how to work it and understand what’s going on.”
-Pamela D. Knudson
return to top
|
