Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe in Nevada is expanding healthcare access with a mobile clinic.
The Mountain West News Bureau’s Kaleb Roedel has more on how tribal patients are getting the healthcare they need.
After years of driving their vehicles to neighboring reservations, the tribe bought a mobile clinic last year.
It was funded by a $673,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, aimed at expanding rural healthcare access after the pandemic.
The tribe’s mobile clinic serves its members and drives to the Lovelock Paiute and Yomba Shoshone reservations – covering a territory of about 200 miles. It can also treat any member of a tribe in Nevada.
Joy Schultz, a registered nurse with the Fallon Tribal Health Center, helps a patient check in for a mobile clinic appointment. (Photo: Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau)
Jon Pishion is the director of the Fallon Tribal Health Center. He says they serve about 2,000 people, averaging about 20 patients each month.
They try to visit each tribe at least once a month, but that isn’t always easy.
“Challenge is weather and distance. They are far away. And during winter, sometimes these areas get hard to access here.”
Mobile health clinics are also being used by the Navajo Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona, and the Fort Peck Tribes in Montana.
“I think having the providers go into community opens their eyes to the needs and how to better serve them.”
Dr. Christopher Chai is working at the mobile clinic here in Lovelock. He says they can even act as an urgent care for injuries and wounds.
“We will get the random rancher come in with a broken finger and say, like, what do I do with this – it sliced open – and we can put in stitches.”
Pishion adds that the clinic also helps tribal members be proactive instead of reactive about their health.
“We have some people that maybe only come in when they’re sick, but now they’re seeing us for their preventative care when we come out.”
Like Barbara Bonta, an elder of the Walker River Paiute Tribe who lives in Lovelock.
“I’ve been seeing them for my feet and other problems that I didn’t know I had till they started testing this and testing that.”
Barbara Bonta, left, an elder of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, sits on an exam table inside the Fallon Tribal Health Center’s mobile clinic. Nurse Joy Schultz prepares to check her vitals. (Photo: Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau)
Bonta was brought to the mobile clinic by her daughter Tia Happy.
“With my mom, she can’t sit for a long time in a car to go to Fallon or elsewhere to appointments, so it makes it super convenient when the mobile comes here.”
Happy says her mom’s been seeing Dr. Chai for the past two years, consistent care that’s been made possible by this mobile clinic, which isn’t slowing down.
This year, the clinic plans to add dental care to its services.
An example of a Turquoise Alert issued for people missing under suspicious circumstances in Arizona. (Courtesy Arizona Department of Public Safety)
Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) announced last week the launch of the Turquoise Alert system for Native Americans.
It’s a new tool intended to help the state’s department of public safety and law enforcement respond when vulnerable people go missing.
In May, Gov. Hobbs signed legislation creating the alert. It was deployed before its effective date this fall.
Hobbs says the tool is a meaningful step to improve the safety and wellbeing of communities across Arizona, and in particular Tribal communities, which have suffered from a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Tribal leaders were among those to advocate for the alert system.
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis (Gila River Indian Community) took to social media to announce the launch of the Turquoise Alert, saying it’s in honor of Emily Pike, a San Carlos Apache teenager who went missing and was later found dead.
“I feel the weight of every story of a missing loved one. Now the creation of the Turquoise Alert System through Emily’s Law is deeply meaningful to me and to all tribal communities across Arizona. We have long lived with the painful reality that our Indigenous brothers and sisters, our relatives, go missing at alarming rates and too often slip through the cracks of systems not built to protect them.”
Gov. Lewis says the Turquoise Alert gives tribal communities a fighting chance to bring their relatives home.
The alert will be activated when a person goes missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances and is believed to be endangered.
Get National Native News delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up for our daily newsletter today.
Leave a Reply