Medical Director Leaves for Far-Off Lands

Paul Zimmer. Via Alaska Academy of Family Physicians

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

The now former medical director at the Kodiak Community Health Center has left the island for the far-off land of Washington D.C. From there, he’ll travel to an even farther-off land.

Paul Zimmer and his wife, Tia Leber, are in-transit to the capital, where Zimmer will receive training to become an employee of the U.S. Department of State.

“It’s the foreign service, so I’ll be running clinics out of embassies around the world. So, there’s about 45 different sites, major embassies, where there’s a physician that’s stationed, and each physician is in charge of clinics in three or four other countries around there as well and, every year or two or three, you switch over to a new place.”

He says his job will be to treat U.S. government employees and their families. And that’s what he’ll be training for in D.C. during the next three or four months.

“But then after that we’ll go somewhere overseas, so we’ll find out for sure in another few weeks, but I’ve been told there’s gonna be three positions that are open, and one of them is Abu Dhabi, and one of them is a fill-in, a temporary position, where you fill in for people that are away on vacation or if they’re sick, so that’s based out of Washington D.C., and every month or so I’d be going off to a different country and working in a different place.”

Zimmer says he was confident about getting the position because he has the right background and did well in the evaluation, but says it was frustrating to wait so long and be unable to plan for the next stage in his life.

He says it’s taken about a year and a half to get to this point.

“It’s an amazingly, ridiculously complex process of applying and having the right credentials and then having to go to Washington D.C. for a pretty grueling evaluation. It’s called an oral assessment they call it. And then a security clearance process and then medical clearance.”

Zimmer says he’s excited for the transition, but the City of Kodiak and the Community Health Center have been wonderful places to work.

“So, that’s gonna be hard to give up, but on the other hand, this will be something different. I’ve been doing that for 21 years and 21 years of working the ER for 24 hours every Wednesday and being on call every third or fourth night and being woken up a lot and not being able to sleep in my bed all the time, and this’ll be different.”                        

He says it’ll also cater to some of his other interests, such as international politics and foreign affairs.

But it’s not so easy to leave the West Coast. In an email update from Leber on Monday, she wrote that she and Zimmer were still stuck in Seattle and would have to wait three days before they could grab the next flight to D.C. as the nation’s capital continues to dig out from the weekend blizzard.