Clinic closes, honors longtime family physician

PALMER — Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson says being a family physician has been “a great calling.”

Fifteen years after she opened the Mat-Su Valley’s first clinic to provide obstetric care in 1985, Dr. Baldwin-Johnson and her two other physicians accepted Providence Medical Group Alaska’s offer to buy their practice.

“I think the reason we agreed to it is that we felt our missions were really aligned,” Baldwin-Johnson said.

With a high proportion of uninsured and Medicaid patients, Baldwin-Johnson saw more opportunity to continue seeing those patients with Providence’s help.

“We were able to see patients like that that other physicians might not have been willing to see when we were a part of Providence,” she said.

But the end of an era came on New Year’s Eve. As detailed in a November 2014 Frontiersman news story, Providence decided there was no longer a need for the company to have a primary care clinic in the Valley, and as of Dec. 31, 2014, the facility at 2250 S. Woodworth Loop in Palmer will only remain open to behavioral health patients. All the primary care doctors, to the best of Baldwin-Johnson’s knowledge, have accepted positions at other clinics, most of them local.

Baldwin-Johnson, however, decided to end her more than 30-year tenure as a family physician to work full-time for Alaska CARES, the Providence-owned child advocacy center in Anchorage, where she has worked part-time since 2005.

“Although I know that there’s more than enough work for me to do and I’m very committed to doing this work, I will really, really miss the family medicine part,” she said.

One thing about spending so many years practicing family medicine in one location is that a doctor really gets to know his or her patients.

“As a family doctor I’ve been able to share in such important times in people’s lives,” Baldwin-Johnson said. “I’ve been able to be the one that, you know, helps (parents) hear their baby’s heartbeat for the first time.”

Knowing that makes the exact length of her professional career seem in a way less significant, however.

“The number of years, I think, isn’t as important as just wanting to be sure that all of my patients that I had, some of them for decades, were going to be able to successfully find another doctor,” she said.

Though she has been assured all her patients have accepted care from other providers, Baldwin-Johnson said she will miss seeing them on a regular basis for more than one reason.

“I had these decades-long relationships with my patients that had become my friends, and it was also a nice balance to be able to see children for whom abuse is not a concern,” she said.

But as she said before, she is committed to the work she has now, and has been for some time. Baldwin-Johnson co-founded The Children’s Place, the advocacy center in Wasilla, in 1999, and although she will be commuting to Alaska CARES most days, she will remain an active volunteer out here.

“The Valley’s my home,” she said.

And as emotionally difficult as the job may be, Baldwin-Johnson is prepared for what lies ahead.

“There is unfortunately more than enough child abuse work to do,” she said. “I would like to be able to work myself out of a job, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen in my professional lifetime.”

Nevertheless, she is heartened by the fact that Alaska does have child advocacy centers now, and that local organizations and individuals continue to support them.

A reception for Dr. Baldwin-Johnson will be held at what is now the behavioral health clinic and medical group office located down the hill from Mat-Su Regional Medical Center at 6 p.m., Jan. 7.

The event is open to the public and light refreshments will be served. Anyone who would like to write a memory or thank you note to Dr. Baldwin-Johnson may do so at the reception or send it by mail to the clinic at Providence Medical Office Building Mat-Su, 2250 South Woodworth Loop, Suite 101, Palmer, AK 99645.

For more information about The Children’s Place and other child advocacy centers in Alaska, visit thechildrens-place.org.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.