Orcas Family Health Center has recently hired Family Nurse Practitioner Phoebe Hershenow, who will work with Dr. David Shinstrom four days a week.

She has experience working in a variety of settings, especially rural and out-of-the-way places. She and her husband Nick, who is a writer, were in the Peace Corps in the Congo and then Zaire in the 1980s. For most of the last 18 years they have lived in McCall, Idaho, where they raised their two children. The family spent a year working at an orphanage in Honduras and most recently Nick and Phoebe were in Loja, Ecuador for a year and a half, doing rural health projects.

Hershenow started out in health care in the early 1970s, in high school, working as an aide in a nursing home. She was an EMT and a nurses’ aide in her college years and became an RN in 1985. After working at a university neurology unit, an inner city ER, and for nine years in a small town hospital/ER, she became a family nurse practitioner in 1999.

She sees all kinds of patients but has a special interest in women’s health and, because she speaks Spanish, is happy to see Spanish-speaking patients.

OFHC is located at 1285 Mt. Baker Rd., Suite B102. and be reached at 376-7778.