UO > Community Profile

[ previous ]

City folk

If you like to shop at Nordstrom’s, enjoy sunlight five hours a day during the “dark” winter season, and visit art galleries on par with Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, then cities like Anchorage hit the mark. “There are a couple of restaurants here that to me are New York quality, with wine lists right out of Wine Spectator,” says Laura Screeney, a consultant to the office of physician recruitment for Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage. “Yet you can walk in there wearing your hiking boots and fleece.”

Southcentral Foundation is one example of a health system the native tribes bought back from the federal government’s Indian Health Service. Screeney’s primary-care arm oversees the Native American population in this city of a quarter million people. Unlike most images the word “clinic” conjures up, this service on the campus of the Alaska Native Medical Center—the main tertiary care facility for the state’s native residents—runs with incredible efficiency.

“As a doctor, you’re not restricted,” she notes. “You’re not worried about malpractice because our physicians, like those at the Veterans Administration, are covered under the federal policy for malpractice insurance.”

In this organization, each physician has an RN case manager and either an LPN or medical assistant on his team. All three share an office, the better to deal with the same patient panel. So in many cases, the RN case manager can take care of prescription refills and follow up on patient education for medication instructions. To the physician, it means not shoving a stack of pink notes in your pockets to deal with in a spare moment.


	Tempted? Older physicians longing to experience the good old days of practicing medicine just one more time before they retire—or are just plain burned out on the routine of medicine—often find Alaska the answer to their dilemmas. However, ditching the condo in Florida for a snowmobile in Alaska doesn’t always appeal to the spouses, and significant others still active in their professions may find a difficult time continuing their careers here. After all, the Arctic Circle isn’t a bastion of lawsuits for the lawyers or a real find for an antique-store owner. In that case, Lee Norman, MD, now a practice consultant based in Seattle, recommends checking out temporary duty physician status. TDY physicians usually accept three- to six-month assignments, work closely with younger physicians, and encourage mentoring. “It’s a wonderful enhancement and something a lot of older physicians have appreciated,” Norman says. For more information, contact the Indian Health Service office for the state at 907-729-3633 or go to www.ihs.gov/FacilitiesServices/AreaOffices/ Alaska/index.asp.

There’s always a big push for family medicine physicians in this setting, as well as psychiatrists. “They can name their bucks right now,” Screeney says. Over at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, in another “large” city of 82,000, medical staff recruiter Paul Allen is also on the hunt for internists, pulmonologists, neurologists, and orthopaedists. In the future, they could be in the market for a cardiologist, but it’s a rare subspecialty that finds an audience in this state.

“We just don’t have a large enough population to support two,” Allen explains.

Alaska boasts just one family practice residency program, so even recruiters in the urban settings can’t rely on this relationship to feed their programs. They have to sell the opportunities in the Lower 48. “This also means that if somebody’s an academic person, with a curriculum vitae 48 pages long to include all their publications, it’s not the place for them,” Screeney says bluntly.

But the remark Allen hears most often: “This is the best place I’ve ever practiced.”

The suburbanites

Valley Hospital in Palmer serves an area the size of West Virginia, running from the base of Mt. McKinley on the west side, to Lake Wasilla in the east, with parts of the Denali Highway included in between. Wasilla hosts an 80,000-square-foot urgent care and surgery center, but the hospital sponsors zero medical clinics in this region. In a nutshell, patients find their way into the 40-bed hospital in Palmer when they need medical attention.

Although the size of a state, this area is considered suburban to Anchorage. Like many American suburbs, the borough is jumping with a 4.7 percent annual growth rate since 2000. Home Depot opened in November 2004, followed by Lowe’s in December. The Wal-Mart here is the busiest location in the discount chain’s West Coast properties, and it sells more Duck brand duct tape than any other Wal-Mart in the United States.

Still, folks like Rita McNeal wouldn’t mistake this area for Anchorage. She owns a 2,500-square-foot home on 13 acres, a spread that includes a 5,000-square-foot barn and a stream where salmon spawn at the bottom of a mountain. Bear, wild sheep, and moose wander into her yard, blending in with the breathtaking mountain scenery in the background. She owns horses, dogs, and pigs while still living just a 15-minute drive away from Wasilla or 20 minutes to Palmer.

“We grow awesome gardens,” she brags. “Because of our length of sunshine, our vegetables here have more sugars in them. So our carrots are really sweet, peas are packed with flavor, and my corn last year grew just fine.”

Physicians here really break out the “big boy” toys, indulging in boats, skis, and dog-sled teams. Some subdivisions even accommodate private airplanes, so doctors can park their wings at the house. (One Valley Hospital doctor literally commutes by air since the Palmer Airport is adjacent to the hospital.)

Soon, they’ll have an impressively equipped 75-bed facility, now under construction. “At the very least it will have the best view of any hospital in the country,” McNeal says of this boutique hospital designed to face a glacier, three mountain ranges, and the Pacific Ocean in the form of Cook Inlet. Physicians, of course, appreciate the MRI, PET, and CT scanners they’ll be able to get their hands on.

“One of the doctors I recruited two years ago told me, ‘You’re better equipped than the major hospital in Denver,’” she laughs.

Perhaps the best news is the list of specialty physicians McNeal needs to staff this new building. Obviously, there’s room for family practice, but she puts internists and nutritionists higher on the list. She has needs in cardiology, thoracic surgery, pulmonology, breast surgery, gastroenterology, and psychiatry.