General surgeon offers services in Kimball weekly

Kimball welcomes a new general surgeon on staff, with a focus in rural surgical practice, meaning a general family medicine approach to surgery.

Dr. Matthew Jansen comes to town from Sidney once each week to provide services as varied as those who see him at a time when most surgeons narrow their focus to provide a very specific set of procedures. Jansen opted instead to learn a wide variety of procedures.

"I perform any basic surgery, whether that is scopes, hernias; I'm just trying to meet the need of the community and bring that back here," he said. "The modern way medicine goes is you do a residency, with general surgery it is five, six or seven years in some programs, And then on top of that you will do some advanced training to focus you in on some area. That can be anywhere from one to three years of additional training."

Jansen said there are really only a couple of programs that will train surgeons in a broad aspect; to ready them to meet the needs of rural areas.

"I actually found a small program that allowed me to create my own residency program," he added. "It was a lot of work and I was always on call, but I got to spend a lot of time with urologists; I got to spend a lot of time with plastic surgeons and I got a very broad training so I could do something like this."

Jansen said his training is a completely different style of training. It is not a widely known or available program, Jansen added, but there is a focus on it now and there are those pushing for this kind of training.

"This rural surgery is a developing field, I guess a redevelopment of an old concept and there is only maybe five or six people trained that way per year," Jansen said. "It means that over the last 20 or 30 years the number of rural general surgeons has dropped by double digit percentages. People aren't training broadly anymore. It will eventually be a big problem for the country."

He can perform various types of scopes, hernias, bariatric surgery, cesarean sections, removal of appendix, gall bladders and tonsils, among other surgeries. Additionally, Dr. Jansen has added training in endoscopy, urology, obstetrics and ENT.

"I initially wanted to do family medicine but gravitated to surgery because of all the things you can do," he said.

Surgeries no longer have to mean travel to and from a specialist, which saves patients time and money.

"Wound care is big. The technology has made a lot of strides even since I started training. We have had a couple of wounds that have been there for years that we were able to get rid of. That is something that can definitely be done in an outpatient setting," he added. "A big portion of things are scopes, and there are a lot of things that used to be overnight stays that are not any longer. Gall bladders are a very good example. Those are definitely ones that we can get you home the same day, and do them here."

Jansen grew up in northern California and moved to the east coast with his parents following graduation and later attended college and medical school in Pennsylvania, but he was always drawn to the midwest.

"I always wanted to live in a rural area and a small town," Jansen said. "The town I grew up in was small by California standards, 20,000 people. I was looking at more frontier places, Alaska, Montana and Wyoming."

Jansen and his family spent a week in Sidney, at the invitation of Janell Wicht, Physician Recruiter/Liaison for Sidney Regional Medical Center. Although SRMC recently built a new hospital, the facility had little to do with his decision.

SRMC had some doctors that have been preparing for retirement, and Wicht stepped in to find new doctors to work with the current doctors as a transition for those phasing their practice out according to Evie Ranslem-Parsons, Director of Public Relations at SRMC.

"We all benefit if we can keep (patients) in the area," Ranslem-Persons added. "You recover faster and better at home."

"It is a beautiful new hospital but I am more interested in the people and the town itself – a good place to raise a family. That is what drew me to the area."

Though the area is often referred to as quiet, Jansen said his home is anything but with three young daughters, aged four, two and six months, a garden, chickens, goats, pigs and the family has added bees this year.

Since Jansen relocated to Sidney, he and Dr. Thayer, the other general surgeon at Sidney Regional Medical Center, have expanded their practices to outlying areas, including Kimball and Bridgeport.

Kimball Health Services CEO Ken Hunter, added that Kimball Health Services has enjoyed a good relationship with SRMC, and doctors from Sidney have traveled to Kimball for some time.

"Dr. Plate did general surgeries for years," Hunter said. "That kept most of our people from having to go out of town. This is really almost a reinvention of what Dr. Plate was with modern training."

Hunter added that there is plenty of family practice rural tracks in health care, but those don't incorporate surgery.