There’s a new doctor in Tallassee and will help support a long time nurse practitioner at Ivy Creek Family Care of Tallassee.
Jess Robbins has been at the clinic for several years as a nurse practitioner. She is now joined by Dr. Ana Ahuja who recently completed her residency and started her first job in Tallassee on Monday. The two took different paths to become medical providers but it means better care for patients in Tallassee.
Dr. Ahuja’s parents moved the family to Clanton.
“They wanted to raise their kids in a small town,”Dr. Ahuja said. “That's kind of how the whole medicine thing started. I was in some science clubs there and started volunteering at Children's Hospital in Birmingham. My dad used to drive me there.”
Dr. Ahuja went to UAB for a medicine focused undergraduate degree. Two months ago she finished her residency in Huntsville.
Robbins started out in ambulance and EMS care.
“I then decided to go into RN and then progressed to NP,” Robbins said.
She was working for Ivy Creek in Dadeville during COVID and jumped at the chance to come to Tallassee when the clinic opened as she was commuting from Millbrook.
Ahuja grew a love for rural communities starting with her childhood. In Clanton she got to know a doctor who inspired her love of medicine and community service.
“I liked that our family doctor knew everybody in town,” Dr. Ahuja said. “He was also a councilman. He was a man who wore many hats. I kind of knew I wanted to do something like that.”
Dr. Ahuja is a mother of two including a two-month old and hasn’t quite decided what her community service will be.
Working in a rural medical clinic offers the providers to do more than just provide medical care to patients. They get to know them. It also affords Dr. Ahuja and Robbins the chance to see a variety of things. A patient may come in with a cut. The next might have the flu.
“You just never know what might come in,” Robbins said. “It keeps you on your toes.”
Dr. Ahuja’s residency in Huntsville afforded her a chance to offer medical care from the cradle to death.
“We did full scope medicine,” Dr. Ahuja said. “I've delivered babies and I saw the elderly. Here I'm going to be seeing them five and up.”
Dr. Ahuja just started Monday but is looking to have regular patients. Robbins has developed a following in her time in Tallassee.
“I have my regular patients that I just love,” Robbins said. “They are like family.”
It was the family-like atmosphere that drew Dr. Ahuja to Tallassee.
“Every contact I have had with Jess, our office manager Hannah Adams and the rest of the staff has been great,” Dr. Ahuja said. “Their dynamic was so nice, as opposed to a lot of the other places that I was looking at. They were very corporate feeling and it just kind of felt like you were a cog in the wheel. But here, they really care about their patients and their staff. I really liked that.”
Adams understands what having two providers in the same clinic will do. It means they can do more well checkups for children and adults. They can do more preventive medicine and spend more time with patients.
“We can take walk-ups more easily now,” Adams said. “It will allow us to provide better care for more patients. That is what it is all about.”
