NHSC Brings Family Doctor Home Again

Even after a stimulating foray into city life, sometimes small-town memories are strong enough to pull us home again. This is what brought Stephen Flack, M.D., back to his roots in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to work for an NHSC clinic where he can provide medical care to familiar faces.

Though his undergraduate and medical education took him to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, it didn’t take Flack—whose mother has been a nurse and patient advocate for as long as he can remember—away from the ideals he was raised with. That’s why it was easy for him to decide which medical specialty he preferred.

“I just felt that my thoughts about medicine fit in with family practice,” he says. “Whenever I considered what I wanted to do, even from the first day I got to medical school, I wanted to be able to take care of a whole family and people of different ages.”

While Flack was away for training, the folks back home were keeping tabs on him. One such person, Marie Royce, director of physician relations at Chambersburg Hospital, would send Flack a greeting card on occasion to let him know that the hospital would welcome him back once he completed training. Her persistence was just another small reminder to keep his sights focused toward home. Eventually, Flack, with his wife, Tracie, in agreement, decided to seek out a family practice position in the Chambersburg area once he completed his residency.

Flack heard about the NHSC during his first year of medical school, and discovered that there are occasionally scholarship and loan repayment positions available in Chambersburg. He went to the NHSC’s online job opportunities list and saw several listings at Keystone Health Center, a community health clinic that had been established in Chambersburg while he was away at school.

Today Flack has been with Keystone Health Center as a family physician and NHSC Loan Repayor for 3 years. He and Tracie have settled comfortably into the community, and Tracie has temporarily set aside her career as an occupational therapy assistant to stay at home with their two children, 5-year-old Noah and 1-year-old Ethan. They live close enough that Flack can regularly come home during lunch to spend some extra time with the boys and give Tracie a break.

As for his work with patients, Flack finds that Chambersburg offers a challenging clinical population. “A lot of people here have medical problems,” he notes, “and unfortunately, a lot of them hadn’t been able to get medical treatments before”—usually because of expense—“so they let things go and develop other related diseases.” Still, caring for these patients is one of the things that Flack enjoys most about his job. “I like to be able to follow my patients into the hospital and see them on a daily basis,” he says. “I think that really helps with the continuity of care.”

Many of Flack’s patients have the added benefit of knowing him on a personal basis. “It’s an odd day,” he says, “if I don’t run into at least 10 or 15 different people that either know my parents or know my sister, or who went to high school with me.” He adds with a laugh, “Sometimes it’s a little bit weird if I see someone at Wal-Mart and they want to talk about their medical problems while I’m shopping for toothpaste.”

Since Flack’s return to Chambersburg, he says that his growth as a doctor has been tremendous. “I feel like I’m learning something every day,” he explains. “Taking care of people who are significantly ill and have a lot of co-morbid problems really keeps me on my toes.”

He has partnered with David Hoffmann, D.O., an NHSC alumnus and current director of Keystone’s Family Practice Clinic, to learn about caring for HIV patients in surrounding Franklin County. Flack is also learning Spanish, and hopes to join Hoffmann on a trip to Honduras, where they will spend a couple of weeks working in a local clinic and brushing up on the native language.

But there is a health care issue that’s particularly close to Flack’s heart. He and his wife, Tracie, have organized a support group in Chambersburg for families of autistic children. The group meets once a month after hours at Keystone Health Center. Tracie brings homemade snacks and juice, while Jenny Englerth, who is Keystone’s Director of Operations and Community Outreach, and Laurie McBeth, an administrative assistant, provide babysitting so that the parents can focus on each other for a little while.

According to Tracie, approximately 30 families have attended these meetings. The group plans to expand their activities to include community outreach and education about autism, because, as Flack explains, “A lot of people in the community don’t understand the disease.” Flack is particularly aware of this because his older son, Noah, was diagnosed with autism around the time that they moved to Chambersburg, when he was just 1 year old. Flack notes how it can be difficult for parents when their child throws a tantrum in public and onlookers don’t realize that the child’s behavior is due to autism, and not a lack of discipline or bad parenting skills.

One of the parents who attends the meetings is Elaine Forrester. Her daughter Mary was diagnosed at age 3 with Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, a condition that is closely related to autism. Mary is also one of Flack’s regular patients at the clinic.

Forrester believes that having a doctor like Flack is especially helpful when it comes to caring for Mary, who is now 10 years old. “When I go to him with a problem, he knows what we’re going through,” she explains. “I’ve had some experiences with doctors and professionals who didn’t have a clue. But he says he can learn from us, and we can learn from him.” She adds, “Even if he doesn’t know what to do, he’s doing his best to help because he goes home and faces a lot of the same issues.”

Flack does face the same issues as his patients, in large part because he comes from the same place that they do. And he understands their history and their goals for the future, because they are intertwined with his own. In the end, Flack didn’t have to go to the farthest reaches of the Nation to help the NHSC meet the needs of America’s underserved. He was able to find that opportunity in his own backyard, among the very people who inspired him to become a doctor in the first place.