Littlefork Medical Center hires new doctor

Recently, the city-owned clinic and long-term care facility were missing a doctor. The city had used temporary Locum Tenens Physicians while on the search for a new full-time general practice physician since last fall.

Enter Dr. Paul Havens.

“After I met with the staff here, it was like coming home. Very nice, really comfortable place to be,” Havens said.

Havens is from Minnesota originally and is no stranger to small-town medicine. He came to Littlefork from Mesquite, Nev., northeast of Las Vegas, but he said he feels like he is coming home after 13 years in the West.

“I’m from Minnesota. It’s very nice to be here. It’s very green compared to Mesquite.”

He attended the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis and did his residency at Hennepin County Medical Center. He opened a practice with another doctor in Fosston, Minn. He also worked in Lovelock, Nev., with a population of 2,003 residents.

Littlefork recruited doctors via postcards sent last year to, among others, doctors that held Minnesota licenses that were practicing elsewhere.

“My wife and I looked at that postcard and it had pictures of up here,” Havens said. “We used to come up to Kabetogama and camp with our kids in the summertime. And we both got really homesick when we saw that picture.”

Havens got two postcards from Littlefork — one last summer and another this winter. Originally, he turned down the job, saying he was “too old to move.”

But another postcard reminder of “home” and changes to the national health care system had Havens rethinking his decision. He accepted an interview, and within weeks was packing for the move to Borderland.

“I kinda reassessed things. The feds had passed the new legislation, reimbursement was getting to be a problem in Nevada, and I was homesick, so things all came together.”

For Havens, medicine is about more than the paperwork and numbers that he notes has taken over much of medicine, especially in Nevada.

“That’s one of the things that was so pleasant about coming here and interviewing. In Mesquite, it’s all about seeing as many people as you can see in a day and doing as many tests as you can do that are appropriate. And so it’s approaching medicine from a different direction. I like this much better, it’s much more patient oriented rather than having to think about the business at all.”

Havens would rather spend more time talking with patients than dealing with bureaucracy.

“The thing I like best is sitting down and talking to people and just spending that time interacting with them in the exam room, and explaining things to them the best I can. And listening to the things they have to say and giving them the chance to talk about things because oftentimes physicians are so busy they don’t have time to do that,” he said.

Havens said he is happy to take the job with the city of Littlefork, where he can concentrate on patient care.

“I felt that working for a government entity would be a safer place to be than trying to grind it out in a private practice and dealing with all of the changes that are sure to come,” Havens said.

Health care reform, which he notes has been ongoing since Pres. Jimmy Carter, has moved patient care and costs backwards, according to Havens.

“The problem with the federal government ... they don’t know what the problem is, but they’re really smart people and they figure they know how to fix it. And they do things that don’t help, and everything that the federal government has done, from my point of view, since I started practicing has interfered with health care and made it ... it’s not as good as it was 30 years ago.”

“It’s the unintended consequences of legislation that cause a lot of trouble,” he added.

Havens described one particularly demonstrative case in Nevada, where thousands of patients who needed colonoscopy tests that had a state insurance plan were sent to one clinic. Many of the patients contracted Hepatitis C and HIV from unsanitary conditions, which Havens describes as “cutting corners.”

“When blame is being laid for this, they never blame the insurance company that sent all these people to this guy. It’s the guy is a sleezeball, which of course is true, but the real driving thing was saving money for the insurance company.”

He said another thing he had never experienced before practicing in Nevada was doctors refusing to talk about a patient transfer before knowing their insurance status.

“That’s bizarre. I’ve never experienced that, except when I left here and in a place where reimbursement was a much bigger issue than it had been in Minnesota.”

Havens doesn’t have a prescription for national health care, but he sees plenty of problems that need to be fixed, he said.

“I’m not smart enough to have a solution, but I am smart enough to know that all of the solutions that have been put forward so far and put into effect haven’t been particularly helpful in either controlling costs or improvement in quality of care. I don’t know what would have happened if they would have just left it alone.”

Although he said that he does not have hobbies outside of medicine and hasn’t had a chance to meet many of the locals since moving here this month, he is glad to be back in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

“It’s a pleasant cultural change. Minnesotans are less confrontational and demanding. Littlefork is like being in Minnesota — it’s a good place to be.”

The Littlefork Medical Center clinic is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Havens will see patients there except while on rounds at the center’s nursing home.