Local doctor relocates practice to medical office at Holy Rosary
Monday, October 30, 2006 9:50 AM PST
Jennifer Colton | Argus Observer
Ontario
Sporting her white lab coat and pink cowboy boots, Dr. Cynthia Brooke is a new face at Holy Rosary Medical Center.
Brooke and her office staff moved into Suite 200 at the HRMC Medical Office Building Sept. 15 from their old office at Treasure Valley Women's Clinic in Ontario, and began seeing patients Sept. 18.
Brooke, who recently purchased a home in Fruitland, was born in Wenatchee, Wash., and grew up in Tacoma, spending summers at Lake Chelan, Wash.
“This area kind of reminded me of that country there, so I chose to come back to the Northwest from Texas,” Brooke said. “It seemed like there was a great opportunity here to be one of the few female OB/GYNs.”
After graduating from high school in Tacoma, Brooke spent her first two college years in Paris.
“At that point, I thought I wanted to be a linguist for the United Nations,” she said. Brooke then earned her undergraduate degree, attended medical school at the University of Washington and completed her residency at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
“I worked in Seattle and Alaska right after residency,” she said. “When I decided to leave Alaska, I ended up being a traveling doctor for a while until I decided where I wanted to be.”
At one time, Brooke held a medical license in more than five states.
“It was fun,” she said. “I learned a lot because you work in all sorts of settings. You just have to be flexible and adjust to the situation. It got to the point where I would arrive at a hospital, ask where the delivery room was, the operating room and the bathroom and I was good to go.”
Brooke moved to the area in September 2005, and she started seeing patients in November at Treasure Valley Women's Clinic in Ontario.
“I really did enjoy it there, but I had a vision to how I wanted my office to be,” she said. “I wanted to have my own space, a smaller space to work in, just to run my own practice the way I wanted it to be run.”
This month alone, Brooke's office at HRMC scheduled 48 new patients and is now making appointments for November.
“I want to make this office a place where my sister, mother, friends would like to come and be a patient, where I would like to be a patient,” she said.
It typically takes two years to build up a obstetrics practice, Brooke said.
“I think it's very important to me that patients, my office staff and myself work as a team,” she said. “We're putting in 100 percent, so we want them to be the kind of patient who will participate in their care.”
Part of her approach involves looking beyond a patient's physical body and finding out what is going on in a patient's life because those actions and choices can impact health, Brooke said.
“If you have a goal, things you want to do, that impacts highly on the decisions you make regarding your health,” she said.
Every doctor brings a personality to the job, and patient connection and understanding is an important part of Brooke's practice.
“I think it's very difficult to try and be a good doctor,” she said. “If you want to be a mediocre doctor, that's not hard to do, but to provide really excellent care to patients, not just physically, but psychologically, it's very difficult to give excellent care to every person.”
Brooke specializes in general and surgical OB/GYN services, menopausal care, cancer screening, treatment of stress incontinence, pelvic reconstruction and routine preventative care. “We're still building our practice,” Brooke said. “We're taking our time, trying to do it right.”
