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Aging doctors: Looming retirements worry rural areas

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San Francisco Chronicle
Summary: 

California has the nation's oldest doctor population, and in few places is it more evident than in scenic, rural Mendocino County, where more than half the physicians are 56 or older. Hospital administrators, experts and the physicians themselves worry about who is going to care for the sick and elderly -- baby boom doctors are retiring just as members of their generation are themselves heading into old age -- and the answers are not satisfying.

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As doctors age, small towns face critical shortage
David Freed, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 3, 2011
Ukiah, Mendocino County— Californians are getting older and so, too, are their physicians. In isolated places like this small, scenic community 110 miles north of San Francisco, fears are rising that as greater numbers of doctors retire, there won’t be enough to take their place. The dilemma looms particularly large here in Mendocino County, whose 159 doctors, as a group, are among the oldest in California. A statewide survey conducted in 2009 by UCSF found that half of the county’s physicians were over 56.
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Internist, 65, says he and his patients have ‘grown old together’
David Freed, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 3, 2011
Willits, Mendocino County— In the 36 years he’s been practicing medicine in the “Gateway to the Redwoods,” as this picturesque northern California town of 6,000 bills itself, internist Bruce R. Andich, 65, has helped myriad patients accept the often painful truths of getting old. “We’ve grown old together,” he says. “I just got my Medicare card. It’s a very sobering experience.” There is, however, one age-associated experience that Andich has had difficulty coming to terms with: the prospect of his own retirement.
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Dermatologist, 77, plans to practice ‘as long as I can’
David Freed, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 3, 2011
Ukiah, Mendocino County — Dermatologist Richard McClintock is 77 years old, small-town and old-school to the core. The modest clapboard home that has served as his medical office since 1970 doesn’t even have a computer. Four decades of patient files fill two converted bedrooms. To say that McClintock is a fixture in Ukiah would be putting it mildly. “It takes me half an hour just to get through Safeway,” he joked.
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Nurses, schools help rural areas combat shortage as doctors age
David Freed, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 3, 2011
Cathy Frey has few illusions when it comes to enticing newly-minted, urban-oriented physicians to live and work in rural California. “It’s a horrid problem,” says Frey, executive director of the Alliance for Rural Community Health in Ukiah. “It’s beautiful here, but somebody new coming out of medical school, this is kind of like no man’s land.” While her concerns are echoed by experts and by health providers throughout rural California, there are at least some stopgap strategies to the looming shortage of doctors in those areas, particularly those in primary care.
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Ukiah internist, 49, an exception — ‘Nobody wants to come here’
David Freed, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 3, 2011
Ukiah, Mendocino County — Dr. Michael Carnevale grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and couldn’t wait to trade the big city for the tranquillity of a life amid pine forested wilderness. With help from a government-funded program, he found that life in Mendocino County after graduating in 1993 from medical school in Texas. “I thought I was at the beginning of a wave,” Carnevale said. “I remember thinking, ‘Everybody’s gonna want to come here.’ It was such a naive point of view, looking back. I mean, nobody wants to come here.” At 49, boisterous and boyish, he is among the youngest physicians in Mendocino County.
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Mulitmedia: Docs on their aging profession
Lauren M. Whaley, CHCF Center for Health Reporting | January 4, 2011
Click on the audio slideshows below to hear these four doctors talk about the aging physicians in Mendocino County.
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