The Boy is Back in Town

For Dr. Joseph Barnard, there’s nothing quite like the comforts of home. The family practice physician, who set up shop at Ozarks Healthcare earlier this year, always knew he wanted to contribute to his hometown even if it took a little while to figure out just how to do it.
“My family moved to West Plains when I was about 10 years old,” he said. “I graduated from West Plains High, and for the first couple years, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. For a while there, I thought of maybe going into the FBI, but when I started with general studies in college, I kind of gave up on that idea.”

Instead of law enforcement, healthcare beckoned as a way to serve others in the town he loved to call home. He landed a gig at Ozarks Healthcare as a physical therapy tech and switched to Ozarks Technical College where he earned a two-year physical therapy assistant degree.
“I worked for the hospital and around some of the other clinics and things in the area for about three years,” he said. “In the meantime, I met my wife. By 2008, I started having the conversation that I wanted to go to medical school. I just wanted to do more. I won’t necessarily say I was bored with physical therapy, but I just felt like I was very limited.”

Everyone who attends medical school makes personal sacrifices, and Barnard was no exception. For two years, he’d drive from the family home in Thayer, Missouri, to Springfield to take classes three times a week, then back to West Plains where he continued to work full time. In 2012, he flipped his schedule to live in Springfield during the workweek, then come home on weekends serving his family and home health clients. That grind also lasted two long years.

The sacrifice paid off when he returned to West Plains for his first medical job out of residency. The time he spent previously at the hospital helped the transition to his new practice, just as it did in medical school.

“The work experience that I had definitely helped,” he said. “I could tell right off the bat when we were doing some of our simulated patient encounters in school, it was much easier for me to talk to a patient because I’d already been doing it.

“It was really easy for me to go into family medicine because when you’re doing PT, you’re seeing a patient for 30–45 minutes and you really get to know them. So, you can tease out the questions that you need to ask, the information that you need. I think it carried over a lot.”
Barnard said his biggest advantage, however, is his wife Kista, who’s an RN and travel nurse. He said having a partner who can understand the stress of a job in healthcare these days is a resource he values greatly.

“It’s really hard for anybody to understand that, unless you’ve actually just been in this situation,” he said. “If there was one thing about having somebody in the family who is a healthcare professional, it’s that she often gives me a perspective that maybe I didn’t think about.

“It could be something that we’re talking about, ‘Oh I had this come in today and blah, blah, blah,’ and oftentimes she can offer perspective, being a nurse. She’s spent a lot of time with patients and kind of getting to know family dynamics and stuff. I think that has probably been the greatest advantage.”