Health Notes
Just two doctors serve this small Alabama town. What’s next when they want to retire?
By Arielle Zionts in KFF Health News, Sep 2023
LaFAYETTE, Ala. — Charity Hodge had mixed feelings when she spotted a Facebook post announcing that her longtime primary care doctor was ready to retire after decades of serving their rural community.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, no!'” Hodge recalls while sitting in an exam room on a July afternoon, waiting to see the physician, Dr. Terry Vester. “Well, I’m happy for the retirement part, but that’s my favorite doctor, so I’m crying on the inside.”
Hodge, a 29-year-old customer service representative, has been seeing Vester for nine years. She had come to check in on her diabetes management and to ask for anti-nausea medication in preparation for a cruise.
LaFayette — pronounced “luh-FAY-it” by most residents — and surrounding Chambers County face high rates of disease and chronic illness. Yet Terry Vester and her husband, Dr. Al Vester, are the only primary care doctors in the town of 2,700 residents, surrounded by farms and other small communities.
The Vesters are in their late 60s and would like to retire soon. Terry Vester wants to spend more time with her grandson and aging parents. But she can’t imagine abandoning her patients, some of whom she has cared for since they were born.
“There are people here that still need in-town doctors,” says Vester, who sometimes visits patients in their homes. “So we want to stay here to take care of them until someone else is here to take care of them.”
Terry Vester’s worry — leaving her town with no doctors — is already reality across much of rural America, where many residents have health problems but few health care professionals to turn to.
LaFayette, in east-central Alabama near the border with Georgia, is a 30-minute drive to the nearest sizable city, the college town of Auburn. Its lush, wooded neighborhoods include elegant, restored homes with wraparound porches and massive lawns. But the town also has formerly grand houses that have fallen into disrepair, plus mobile homes and public housing…
