Family physicians named best for practice, teaching

View larger image Dr. J. William Kerns, right, and intern Valerie Robuck, a fourth-year medical student from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, conduct an office visit with patient Richard Ziemer, of Strasburg, at Front Royal Family Practice. Kerns was recently honored by the Virginia Academy of Family Physicians for clinical and teaching excellence. Rich Cooley/Daily Recommend This Print This Get E-mail News Alerts Buy Photos/Page Reprints * Breaking News If local news is breaking and you know about it: * Call Us: 800-296-5137 * E-mail Us * Upload Your Photos View larger image Dr. Frank X. Dennehy speaks to interns in a conference room at Front Royal Family Practice.

By Alex Bridges -- abridges@nvdaily.com

FRONT ROYAL -- Doctors J. William Kerns and Frank X. Dennehy could compete for most modest award winner if such an honor existed.

Instead, Dennehy and Kerns received awards for Teacher of the Year and Family Physician of the Year from the Virginia Academy of Family Physicians. Neither would take much credit for the honors during separate phone interviews. Instead they lauded each other and passed kudos on to staff at Front Royal Family Practice, which Kerns founded in 1978, and faculty with the Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency Program.

"In fact, in your life do you ever accomplish anything worthwhile without having some huge influence and help from other folks, and I don't think that's possible," Kerns later added. "If I didn't have family support, if I didn't work with wonderful people, there wouldn't be a Front Royal Family Practice, and there wouldn't be a residency, and there wouldn't be all these great things that we enjoy and I hope [have] certainly benefited the community in which we work."

A strength of the practice and the residency program is that the medical office remains private and independent, Kerns said.

Both doctors serve as members of the attending medical staff at Warren Memorial Hospital, and as associate clinical professors in the program, established in 1997 by Valley Health and the Medical College of Virginia/VCU. Dennehy also has served as the program's residency director since 2005.

As Kerns recalled, people behind the program had a vision of hiring academic physicians who would then start a family medical practice and take on residents. Front Royal Family Practice told them they already performed the tasks needed for a residency program.

"It's been good for us educationally," Kerns said. "I think it's good for our patients because a lot of times they get the young doctors who are asking, 'Well, what about some of these more unusual things?' Then you have the more experienced physicians saying, 'Well, common things happen commonly,' but I find a lot of the times when a resident raises a question, there are things they bring up that are well worth listening to, and I think the patients benefit from the combination of experience and youthful knowledge base that helps us give good patient care."

Kerns and other faculty work with and observe students in the program.

"I was working with a medical student, working side by side with them in the office this morning," Kerns recalled. "This afternoon I'll be supervising several residents as they see patients, and I will be reviewing all of their charts. I will see the complex patients that they see. Then there'll be other patients with whom they'll just need to discuss things with me or ask for an opinion about things that I won't necessarily have to go physically see."

The night before, Kerns worked on-call with a resident and both saw a patient in a hospital emergency room. The resident also admitted a patient he and Kerns discussed.

Dennehy called residencies "on-the-job training" that takes three years and follows four years each of college and medical school.

Family medicine, meanwhile, began in 1969 in response to the disappearance of general practitioners and to develop a specialty that would meet the needs of the U.S. population, according to Dennehy. Family practice is one of the few specialties that require expertise in public health and prevention, he said.

"It's a specialty of what's common and it's what the average person will need medically through their lifetime, from conception to death," Dennehy said. "The training is two-fold and it's based on basically those early studies of what problems come up."

Residents spend most of their time at Winchester Medical Center and the brief clinic periods at the Front Royal Family Practice, Dennehy said.

"Our focus is to give them the extra skills and independence to be able to practice in a rural area, 'cause the residency was specifically designed to place physicians in the Shenandoah Valley, and there are tons of small towns that have been depleted of doctors, and that's why we're training them," Dennehy said.

The residency program has had 48 graduates since its inception, according to Dennehy. Half of the graduates continue to practice in Virginia and nearly that many work in rural areas, he said.

"Rural training programs rarely place that many people in rural areas 'cause doctors are city people and so are their spouses," Dennehy said.

Family connections play a role in why doctors leave after their residency rather than a desire to make more money, Dennehy said. Sometimes "adventure" leads doctors away from the area they spent their residency, he added. But many in the region's program have stayed. Of the graduates, 14 work in the immediate Valley Health area, 10 began solo practices and six teach residents, according to Dennehy.

"So it's a pretty impressive result in just a short number of years what we've been able to accomplish here," Dennehy said. "I mean it's not me, it's the whole group."

Kerns' award often goes to older doctors who have done "three or four decades of amazing things and the competition is pretty fierce," Dennehy said. "I merely got the teacher of the year award in family medicine."

"Obviously Frank would like to be the modest guy about being teacher of the year when there are a lot of excellent family medicine residencies in Virginia and that's nice, but that's not a small deal either," Kerns said.
"But really the citation specifically mentions that really it was what me, as a director, but with the team of faculty have been able to accomplish with our young residency, basically turning it into a middle-aged residency with quite a few accomplishments in just a few number of years," Dennehy said.

The need for family practitioners continues to grow, according to Dennehy. A lack of family medicine facing many communities forces patients to see specialists for ailments just as easily handled by practices such as the one in Front Royal, Dennehy said.

"Probably about 10 percent of people need a referral to a specialists; the rest don't," Dennehy said. "No, we take care of them."

"I think trying to bring good, quality primary care and family medicine to the small towns in the valley is what we're about and I think we do a good job of that," Kerns said.