ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. -- (Editor’s note: As the Air Force Reserve celebrates its 68th birthday this month, the service is also celebrating more than 50 years of being a good neighbor in communities throughout the United States and the world. For years, Air Force Reservists have been helping people in need in underserved areas across the United States through the Innovative Readiness Training program. This story highlights the most recent IRT project.)
About 130 total force service members, including 35 Air Force Reservists, spent two weeks in April on Kodiak Island in Alaska providing free medical and veterinary care to people and pets with limited access to these services as part of Arctic Care 2016.
As a Department of Defense Innovative Readiness Training project, Arctic Care is designed to provide valuable real-world training to military members while addressing public and civil-society needs.
“IRT is the ultimate win-win,” said Maj. Anna Hill, Air Force Reserve Command’s IRT program manager. “The military members involved receive tremendous real-world training working with people from their sister services, and the communities involved receive medical or civil engineering services they desperately need.”
Arctic Care 2016 was a medical IRT project that provided dental, medical, optometry and veterinary services in the city of Kodiak and the smaller villages of Ouzinkie, Port Lions, Larsen Bay, Old Harbor, Akniok and Karluk.
In downtown Kodiak, a city of about 6,000 people, hundreds of locals showed up every day at a converted grocery store to receive basic medical care, have their eyes and teeth examined or to seek care for their pets.
“We are seeing about 60 patients a day in the optometry clinic alone,” said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Joni Scott-Weideman, an optometrist assigned to the Air Force Reserve’s 413th Aeromedical Staging Squadron at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia.
Scott-Weideman and fellow optometrist, Capt. (Dr.) Roxanne Buffano, a Reservist assigned to the 927th Aerospace Medicine Squadron at MacDill AFB, Florida, examined patients and wrote prescriptions for eyeglasses on the spot.
From there, patients could pick from among six different frame options, and their glasses were crafted by specialists from the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity. They could then pick up their new glasses the next day.
“We get to treat patients who have never had an eye exam before, and it’s amazing to see the look on their faces when they are finally seeing like they should be,” Scott-Weideman said, adding that the optometrists worked with officials from the Kodiak Area Native Association to try and arrange follow-on care for people who needed more than a pair of glasses.
Kodiak is by far the biggest city on Kodiak Island, which is dotted with a host of smaller remote villages that are only accessible by plane or boat.
“You can’t drive to these smaller villages, but we know there are people there who still need our help,” Hill said. “So we would send a full team, including a doctor, dentist, optometrist and veterinarian, to these locations for a few days to make sure they were taken care of.
Port Lions is one of these smaller villages and is home to about 150 full-time residents. The village has a small clinic but no full-time health care providers.
“We are so grateful for Arctic Care and the military doctors who have spent the past few days here,” Port Lions Mayor Melvin Squartsoff said. “We’re pretty isolated, and it means the world for our people and their pets to have doctors come here and take care of them.”
On one of the last days of Arctic Care in Port Lions, the community put on a luncheon feast for the health-care providers and a host of Defense Department distinguished visitors who had come to witness Arctic Care firsthand.
Capt. Lisa Alimenti, a health-care administrator assigned to the 940th AMS at Beale AFB, California, said she really enjoyed helping out her fellow Americans during Arctic Care.
“To me that’s the best thing about IRT projects – helping out people who really need it,” she said. “But it’s also great to see all of the services coming together to work as one team.”
“IRT is all about total force,” Hill said. “We work hand in hand with active, Guard and Reserve service members from the Army and Navy on these IRT projects, and this year with Arctic Care we had the opportunity to work closely with the Coast Guard and Canadian service members as well.”
The Arctic Care team members who worked out of the transformed grocery store in the city of Kodiak stayed in tents on the Coast Guard base there. They ate breakfast and dinner prepared in a field kitchen and had meals-ready to eat for lunch each day.
“Our medical crews get most of the attention, and they certainly do a great job, but we have a lot of people working behind the scenes to make these IRT projects work,” Hill said. “We have food services team preparing meals, comm folks making sure we can all communicate and logistics people ensuring our teams have all of the equipment they need. These ‘behind-the-scenes’ folks are getting excellent training as well.”
In addition to Arctic Care, Air Force Reservists will be taking part in a host of other IRT projects this year, both medical and civil engineering. Other medical IRTs include the South Mississippi medical IRT in the Natchez community and Tropic Care medical IRTs in Hawaii.
Reserve civil engineers will be taking part in IRTs in support of the YMCA of the Rockies, the Chenango community in New York, the Southwest Indian Foundation in New Mexico and Arizona, and the Boy Scouts of America in Camp Hinds, Maine.
Although her plate is full of IRT projects for 2016, Hill said she is already looking forward to Arctic Care 2017.
“The Navy was the lead service for Arctic Care 2016, and they did a tremendous job,” she said. “We (the Air Force Reserve) will be the lead service in 2017, and we are already making plans for next year’s project.”