“First of all, I enjoy very much what I’ve been doing,” Dr. John Atkin said, while sitting in his office in Yates Center. “I still have a need in the community and the community has a need for me.”
Atkin, 78, has been a family practitioner in Yates Center since 1962. The soft-spoken man has become an integral part of the community over the years, and while his job description has changed as he has aged, retirement is not yet on the horizon.
“I think I’ll know when that day comes,” he said. He built his office when he came to Yates Center 51 years ago. Pictures of his family — children and grandchildren standing next to airplanes and posing for senior portraits — hang on the office wall.
“There were not enough family practitioners when I got out of training,” Atkin said of what drew him to southeast Kansas. He grew up in rural Oklahoma, and his father was a general practitioner. He completed his pre-med studies at Oklahoma State University, and graduated from the University of Oklahoma’s medical school in 1960.
Atkin was not going to passively choose a place to live, he wanted to make a calculated choice.
He wrote to agencies in Kansas and Oklahoma, requesting information on communities that needed family practitioners. He received a list of almost 400 communities. His criteria included a town under 10,000 people that was still growing according to the U.S. Census, which narrowed the list to just a handful, including Yates Center.
“The community has become my family,” he said. He met his wife, Pat, in Yates Center and raised six children along the way.
When he came to the town, the medical field was much different. He delivered three babies in homes, and one in the backseat of a car, shortly after he moved there. The ambulance was “nothing more than a station wagon with an oxygen tank.”
“That was the norm then,” he said.
ATKIN said he has changed along with the medical field, and even altered his career to adapt with his age.
“I understand geriatrics better now that I am older,” he said. He has aged along with his patients, and has taken much more geriatric care into his portfolio of work.
“I needed to understand them (geriatric patients),” he said. “I’ve done that purposefully.”
He has been fortunate through the years, and is in excellent health. He attributed today’s older workforce to both advances in healthcare and a strong work ethic.
“We are doing things in our 60s, 70s and 80s that our parents could never have done,” he said.
He admitted to some “frailties of aging,” — a neck and back surgery — that have slowed him down only a bit. He no longer delivers babies or covers shifts in emergency rooms. But, he said he is confident in his abilities as a physician.
“We maintain a better level of health,” he said. “I definitely think a work ethic is involved.”
Atkins has always been involved with smaller communities, even though the healthcare is sometimes a step behind those of metropolitan areas.
“It was a personal choice (to move to a small community), I feel like I understand rural communities,” Atkin said. “It’s the better of all conditions to raise a family.”
When he’s not working, family tends to fill up a lot of Atkin’s time. He said he enjoys rebuilding antique Army vehicles with his son, John, and enjoys nature photography as well.
“I have some more free time, but I’m not sure that I use it productively,” he said with a laugh. Maybe working is too much a part of who he is.
He said he will continue working until he can no longer keep up with the rigors of a full-time job, mentally or physically. Either way, he intends to take a good look at retirement in the near future.
“I’ll take a serious look at it at age 80,” he said.
Until that day comes, Atkin said he is happy in his work, and that’s why he is still here.
“If I was unhappy, I wouldn’t be working,” he said.
