When Dr. Robert Wergin joined the medical staff at Memorial Health Care System 28 years ago, it was like coming home.
There was a time when he and his four brothers played football on the lot where the Milford Clinic was built a few blocks from their home.
On Jan. 18, he will bring his practice to a close, a bittersweet milestone that has allowed him to reflect on a career of service and caring that has taken him from the East Coast to the West Coast and around the block in Milford.
Before that, on Sunday, Jan. 14, MHCS is hosting a farewell reception for Wergin from 3 – 5 p.m. at the Milford Pizza Kitchen.
Over 21 years in Milford and seven in Seward, Wergin built professional relationships with his hometown patients and found great satisfaction in helping them live healthier.
While the small-town memories resonate, they are also at the core of his family medicine career and his national leadership for family physicians and their patients. A long-time member of the American Academy of Family Practice, comprised of about 130,000 physicians, he served as its president from 2013 to 2016.
There was the time he shared a meal with President Barack Obama, his family and the Navy Seal family physicians who cared for them at the White House. He had his photo taken with the president in the Rose Garden.
It was an important time for Wergin, who could advocate to wide audiences for the kind of health care he practiced. It was a long way from Kearney State College and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he earned his degrees.
There was the time a banquet room of around 7,000 physicians (roughly the population of Seward) gave him a standing ovation.
He had an academy “media handler” to prepare him for reporters and craft “sound bites” to get his message across. Wergin was featured in the Wall Street Journal and other major media.
His eight visits to the White House were likely a record for an academy president. He was the only Nebraskan elected its president.
There was the time New York Times reporter Jan Hoffman shadowed him in Milford before writing what became a Page 1 story about a family physician, and he remembers her asking him, “How do I find a doctor like you?”
He is appreciative of Memorial Health Care System allowing him to travel during those years and still maintain his practice here. That commitment to his patients and his practice seemed to influence his colleagues wherever he went. Even when people bring up concerns they thought may be unfamiliar to him.
“You are describing my life, too. I am working to make that better,” he would tell them.
Once they saw his authentic commitment to family medicine, they became his biggest advocates.
“I think the people realized it was my life,” he said.
Such experiences influenced his leadership, including his philosophy of “cheerful persistence” and being sure to talk about the things you love like caring for his patients from birth to death.
“That’s why you see a nearly 70-year-old family physician like me still working,” he said.
It may also be why he was named Nebraska Family Physician of the Year in 2002 and Nebraska Nursing Home Medical Director of the Year in 2012, which is noted on his MHCS website bio.
He has served on the Milford Public Schools Foundation board, was medical director for Crest View Care Center and offered medical services to the Milford volunteer fire department, Milford Public School athletics and the Nebraska Shrine Bowl.
He has been a volunteer faculty member for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, teaching students and residents on rural rotations.
He continues to be a member of the American Medical Association, the Nebraska Academy of Family Physicians and the Nebraska Medical Association.
After beginning his medical career with a family practice residency in Grand Junction, Colorado, in 1982, Wergin worked as an ER doctor in Beatrice. He then practiced in York before joining the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Lincoln Family Residency program, where he encouraged medical students completing residencies to consider family practice.
There was the time he worked alongside Dr. Roger Jacobs at the old hospital clinic in Seward when he first signed on here, and later Drs. Richard Pitsch, Van Vahle, Paul Plessman and Paul Hoff as they affiliated with the system.
He would “stand on the shoulders” of these family physicians to keep improving the quantity and quality of health care available in Seward County, starting with his role in obtaining a used computed tomography (CT) scanner and emergency room improvements.
“We’ve seen dramatic improvements in the facility over the years,” Wergin said, noting the technology and facilities available today.
There was the time three of the residents he had worked with in the UNMC program – Drs, J.B. Ketner, Hank Newburn and Robert Wall – became his colleagues at MHCS.
Perhaps the young family physician he is most proud of is his son, Dr. Brett Wergin, who now practices in Fairbury.
He would advise young physicians to focus on the positive and be comprehensive care givers, delivering babies, helping in the emergency room and everything else.
“There’s opportunity for professional growth and it brings a great amount of satisfaction,” he said. “You can do that in urban areas, but it’s a little more difficult.”
Over the years, Wergin pursued specialized training in cardiac life support, trauma life support and neonatal advanced life support.
Studies have shown, he said, that having a comprehensive family doctor results in better outcomes and lower costs for patients. Including a family physician on the team with needed specialists and “ologists” makes a difference.
“If you wake up with a 103-degree temperature and don’t know who to call, you don’t have a family doctor,” Wergin said.
He finds satisfaction in the number of lives he has impacted in his 28 years in Seward County.
There was the time he cried after delivering the baby of a woman he had delivered 19 years earlier.
“That’s a gift that was given to me that other people don’t have in their jobs,” he said of the multi-generation relationship between doctor and patient.
“I have a sense of sadness that it is coming to an end, but (also) a sense of accomplishment,” he said.
These last weeks in the clinic have included a lot of good-byes.
There was the time recently when a 6-year-old girl hugged his leg as he walked down the hall, crying over his retirement.
“I will not go to a doctor anymore,” she told him.
But he stopped to reassure her:
“I am always going to be your doctor,” he said. “Someone else here may have to fill in for me, but I will always be your doctor.”
