By Melissa Fuson, Vitals contributor
The year was 1974. Young people wore bellbottom jeans, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman rumbled in the jungle, and Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
That same year, Dr. Bill Hoffman, a young physician from Allentown, Penn., joined the National Service Corps, a program established in 1970 to address health care shortages in vulnerable rural and urban communities. That decision brought him to Brownsville, an isolated, mountainous community located about 40 minutes from Yuba City in Northern California.
“There wasn’t much here when I arrived,” Dr. Hoffman remembers. “We had a waiting room, a doctor’s area and three exam rooms, some exam tables and surgical instruments, but it was pretty bare bones.”
Over the next several years, Dr. Hoffman, with the help of another young, idyllic physician, Dr. John Rose (who arrived in 1976 in a Volkswagen bus painted with flowers), built a thriving medical practice, including a pharmacy and optometry, dental, cardiology and hospice care.
“We came to an area that had absolutely no healthcare whatsoever and began building our dream and a model healthcare system for the people here,” Dr. Rose shares.
Drs. Hoffman and Rose did what needed to be done – including making house calls in the middle of snowstorms, delivering babies in cars, and tending to side-of-the-highway emergencies.
“You need to have a very broad-based education to work here. And you can’t be afraid to do new things and get on the phone and ask questions,” Dr. Hoffman says.
In the early 1990s, Drs. Hoffman and Rose (who had taken the practice private about a decade earlier) partnered with Sutter North Medical Group. The partnership not only brought needed financial support it allowed them to make seamless referrals to some of the country’s top specialists — Sutter physicians as far away as San Francisco.
But Brownsville patients continue to rely on the trusted relationships they have with the clinicians they’ve known and lived among for generations.
Nurse practitioner Tawnya Hoffman says patients often come back to them after they’ve seen a specialist somewhere else, just to get their opinion.
“We know everyone here,” Tawnya Hoffman says. “We’ve watched generations grow up, and have babies and grandbabies, and we’re part of a big extended family. It creates a special kind of trust.”
Kay Matuki, a long-time patient of Dr. Hoffman’s, couldn’t imagine going anywhere else for care. “It’s just very personal here. They know us and they’re friends,” she says.
The Hoffmans have been active participants in the Brownsville community for decades — helping build a park and investing in a grocery store and bank over the years. They’ve built special gathering spaces around the clinic, too; on one side of the medical building is an art gallery that hosts “Sip and Paint” events. On the other side, a community-run coffee shop with a brick pizza oven and a small stage for hosting concerts every weekend during the summer.
A new physician begins at the clinic this fall. Dr. Hoffman, who still sees patients, looks forward to sharing everything that makes the clinic and the community he loves so special.
“We like to say people are retired, born here, or running from the law. It’s different every day,” he says. “And a lot of times people just walk in without an appointment. And we never turn them away.”
