467 - A Talk with an Alaskan Public Health Nurse
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since 1893, public health nurses have served the rural communities of Alaska, mainly providing individual patient care for infectious diseases like TB. Public health nurse Lorne Carroll serves an area of about 15,000 people across four Alaskan native villages. He talks with Stephanie Desmon about how public health nursing has changed in recent years with more emphasis on community and systems care, the unique demands of a public health nurse in Alaska, and how COVID has impacted their work, highlighting both challenges and strengths.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.2 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Stephanie Desmond |
| 0:46.7 | talks to Alaska Public Health nurse Lauren Carroll, a Bloomberg fellow at the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:51.8 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. They discussed the health and COVID-19 challenges unique to such a sparsely populated |
| 0:59.1 | and geographically vast area. Let's listen. Lauren Carroll, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:05.0 | Hey, Stephanie, thanks for having me. So, Lauren, you are a public health nurse in Alaska. |
| 1:11.6 | What does that mean? |
| 1:12.6 | Well, Stephanie, that's a good question. |
| 1:14.6 | I guess, you know, like this morning, what it means is I woke up. |
| 1:18.6 | I looked out the window. |
| 1:20.6 | I saw beautiful mountains. |
| 1:22.6 | I live in a spruce forest. |
| 1:24.6 | But after I get off the phone here with you, I'll head into work. For me, |
| 1:28.5 | what that means is about a one mile hike on the snow trail to my truck and then work is about |
| 1:34.0 | 10 miles away. But work itself. I live in an area. It's got about 15,000 folks. It's got four |
| 1:40.2 | different Alaska native villages, four different old Russian bleaver villages. |
| 1:45.3 | And so today, I'll do what I usually do is working with communities, systems, and individuals |
... |
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