GREENFIELD — A little more than a decade after graduating from Greenfield High School, Dr. Kasey (Duclos) Hebert has returned to serve the community she grew up in.
“It’s an interesting situation to be in, to be able to care for people that I know in a different setting,” said Hebert, who recently joined the team at Pioneer Women’s Health, a medical practice located at Baystate Franklin Medical Center.
After graduating from Greenfield High School in 2007, Hebert enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied pre-medicine, neuroscience and biology.
“At that point, I’d always had an interest in medicine,” she said. “Even back in high school, that I can remember.”
After graduating from UMass, she completed an EMT class at Greenfield Community College before getting accepted into a post-baccalaureate program at UMass Worcester, where she then went to medical school. She graduated from medical school in 2017 and completed her residency this year.
“In medical school, I really enjoyed when I did my OB-GYN rotation,” Hebert said. “I really enjoyed working in women’s health. I felt like there was a lot to it.”
Women’s health encompasses emergency care, primary care, surgery, and labor and delivery, for example.
“It just kind of encompasses a large amount of different pieces of medicine, all in one,” Hebert said. “I also just really enjoyed the patient population as well.”
Hebert said whether she’s working with younger patients who want to learn about birth control, or older patients experiencing menopause symptoms, “all of the patients are interested in their health care.”
“I really enjoy working with the adolescent population, and contraception counseling and birth control,” she continued. “But I do the full range of OB-GYN service.”
Hebert said she always knew she wanted to return to Greenfield and was grateful when the position opened up at Pioneer Women’s Health.
“My husband is from Ashfield and … we both just love Western Mass,” she said, adding that they both still have family here. “We wanted to come back to this general area.”
And the “really great practice here,” she said, was an added bonus.
“I’m very happy we came back here and I’m working in my hometown,” she said.
Hebert is one of four physicians at the practice, in addition to about 10 nurse-midwives and the urogynecologist, who is there weekly.
Because she grew up in the area, it isn’t uncommon for Hebert to see people from her childhood, such as parents of friends or people she went to high school with.
“I think people appreciate coming in and knowing the people they’re there to see,” Hebert said. “I always make sure patients are OK with it, and nobody really has turned me away.”
Ultimately, Hebert said, “it’s nice to come home to a community I know.”
“It’s nice to come back to the community I grew up in and feel like I’m giving back to the community in a way,” she explained.
Hebert added that her grandmother, Dolores Braman, who retired from Pioneer Women’s Health and Baystate Franklin Medical Center after 30 years of employment, used to always say she would end up at the practice on Sanderson Street.
“She always said that I would end up here,” Hebert said of her late grandmother. “She was right ... and that was before I even knew I would be an OB-GYN.”
Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne