Press Release
Sutter Regional Medical Foundation
Doctor Retires From Practice of Visiting Patients - June 15, 2008
By Barry Eberling, Daily Republic
FAIRFIELD - Finding a doctor in Solano County who routinely makes house calls just got a lot harder, if not impossible.
Richard Zimmerman retired a few months ago at age 84, or, to be more accurate, retired again. He formally ended a 45-year career as a Fairfield physician in 1994, but he kept making house calls to some 40 patients for another 14 years.
Now he's hung up his stethoscope and is catching up on his reading at his longtime home in the rural county north of Mankas Corner. But he's hoping someone else will take up the calling of making house calls.
"There are a lot of families that are willing to care for elderly people in their own home, provided there's some kind of backup for them,"Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman has paid visits to the houses of patients who suffer from strokes, paralysis, dementia and other illnesses. Getting them to a doctor's office would be difficult, but the families still want to take care of their loved one at home.
The doctor making house calls to those type of patients can't expect the usual, emotional payoff.
"When you're seeing people in the office, each person is a puzzle,"Zimmerman said."They have a problem. The point of the service is to solve the puzzle and get rid of the problem and send them on their way."
The patients he saw making house calls had no such hope. Zimmerman could make them comfortable, but he knew they would never recover. He never got the reward of providing a cure. In some cases, the patients' mental state had deteriorated so badly they didn't even know who he was.
"That is kind of the dark side of it,"Zimmerman said.
Still, he found rewards.
"I think that it is worth doing, that it is necessary to be done,"Zimmerman said. "Well... they're people. They're entitled to and they need to have a certain amount of care."
His house calls also helped the caregivers. He could let them know they were doing everything possible and that setbacks were not their fault. He clearly admires those people.
"I know people who are virtually imprisoned by the care they provide,"Zimmerman said. "They are there all the time." Zimmerman grew up in Santa Rosa and knew since grammar school he wanted to be a doctor, even though there were no doctors in his family. He came to Fairfield in 1950, when the city had only a few thousand people and a handful of doctors.
"It was a small, rural, agricultural town,"Zimmerman said. He entered practice with doctors Ben Smith and Peter Gauder at Empire and Pennsylvania streets near downtown Fairfield, in an office adjacent to the longgone, 12-bed Bunny Hospital. He and other doctors worked to establish Inter- Community Memorial Hospital, today called NorthBay Medical Center.
He helped form what is today the Solano Regional Medical Group, an affiliate of the Sutter Regional Medical Foundation.
The local doctors were general practitioners when Zimmerman arrived, with an office visit costing $3. That's about $26 in today's dollars. It was a different era, one when doctors had their own practices instead of belonging to large medical groups, and one when they had far less technology at their disposal.
"You had to examine the patient and rely on your training and make the diagnosis," Zimmerman said.
All of the doctors made house calls, when necessary. Zimmerman called the practice routine, although that changed as Fairfield grew and the medical system in general changed.
Zimmerman can see the day when house calls will grow more common again. He sees good reasons in many cases to care for the elderly at home rather than send them to nursing homes. High-tech medical equipment is now far more portable.
A New England Medical Journal article in 1997 called house calls a "vanishing practice."But a 2005 article in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association found the practice beginning to reappear. The annual number of house calls rose 43 percent from 1998 to 2004.
One sticking point is the reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.
"Basically, Dr. Zimmerman was doing this out of the goodness of his heart," said Dr. Ronald Rushford, medical director of the Solano Regional Medical Group. "He wasn't being paid adequately for it."
As of now, no one is replacing Zimmerman, Rushford said.
"Dr. Zimmerman had a unique practice,"he said. Meanwhile, even though Zimmerman is really retired this time, he still helps out some of the families and patients he has been seeing.
"I went out and made a house call on a patient this morning," Zimmerman said.