BUCKLAND — Dr. Richard Warner has been retired for two weeks now, but he is showing no signs of slowing down.
The 76-year-old doctor closed his family medicine practice in Buckland after 33 years on Dec. 22, and said it was a hard decision to say goodbye, but he’s ready for the next phase of his life.
“Even quitting at this point was hard,” Warner said. “I just turned 76, and it’s been 33 years, so I figured I might as well face it. … It’s like an extended family; I have several hundred patients that I’ve followed for over 30 years.”
Over the past few weeks, Warner has kept busy cleaning up the office, filing paperwork and saying goodbye to patients.
“There’s a mountain of paperwork involved and it’s been cleaning up everything in the practice,” Warner said. “But the hardest part is just saying goodbye to the patients, knowing that the service we provide here is not one that they’re going to find anywhere else. Unfortunately, the medical landscape has changed.”
Warner explained that he comes from a “different world” of medicine. He grew up during a time when family doctors were the norm, and it was not out of the ordinary for your doctor to make a house call to check on you after you were sick.
“As a kid I’d show up to someplace like this and a doctor would stitch my finger back together. One time the mailman actually brought me to the family doctor because my mom was working,” Warner said. “All I did was imitate my family doctor. … It just seemed natural.”
He noted that there was almost a world without Dr. Richard Warner. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Pennsylvania State University, and had originally intended to pursue a Ph.D. and teach English.
“I saw an article in the Sunday New York Times that said Middlebury College had advertised an opening in its English Department and they had gotten 522 applications, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about another field,'” Warner said. “I went back to school and took science courses and went to medical school.”
Warner graduated from Drexel University College of Medicine in 1978, then spent time practicing medicine in Ghana before settling in Buckland and establishing his practice.
“When I started this practice, there were five full-time family doctors in the Shelburne Falls area and now there’s only one left besides myself,” Warner said. “So patients are going to end up going to Greenfield practices for the most part with nurse practitioners, physician assistants … but it’s just a different landscape.”
Warner said changes in the health insurance industry have fueled changes in medicine, and in recent years, his office manager has spent most of her time on the phone with insurance providers and filling out paperwork for prior authorizations and referrals.
“In my office there were just three off us: my nurse, my office manager and myself. And there’s only so much time to manage the insurance business and practice medicine,” he said.
Warner plans to spend his retirement skiing, cycling, traveling and spending time with his family, particularly his two grandchildren.
“I’m a bicycle nut. I do mountain biking, travel riding, road riding, and I love cross-country skiing, so I’ll have more time for both those hobbies, and I enjoy travel,” Warner said. “I’ll be spending more time with friends and some time traveling.”
He added that while he’s made no decisions yet, he may continue practicing on a part-time basis at another practice.
Warner said this spring he plans to sell the building at 191 Lower St. The 2,918-square-foot building sits on a quarter acre of land, and has an apartment on the second floor and a medical practice on the first floor.
“For 159 years, it was a general store, and the people that ran the store lived in an apartment over the store. When I bought the building, I upgraded the apartment and designed the first floor for a medical practice,” Warner said. “If someone’s interested in the building, hopefully they would see the upstairs tenant as a way to help pay the mortgage and use the first floor.”
Warner said he’s been preparing to retire over the past year and has been saying his goodbyes to patients. On Thursday, he held an open house at his office, where a revolving door of patients popped in to say thank you and wish him well in retirement.
“I just found it to be a very rewarding experience,” Warner said. “It’s a rare privilege to get to know so many patients and have them share details of their lives they wouldn’t ordinarily share in social situations, and feel like you’re an active participant in their health and well-being.”