Though Docs Who Care was established in 1995, the genesis of Docs Who Care really began much earlier. After completing his residency in 1984, Dr. Morsch founded an innovative family practice group in a suburb of Kansas City, which quickly grew to a large and successful group practice. The group he founded was built on the premise that doctors should have plenty of time off for family, church involvement, community service and other volunteer activities, both at home and worldwide.
Dr. Morsch took advantage of his own group’s flexibility, and was soon donating several weeks a year to volunteer activities in mission hospitals and refugee camps around the world. Out of his international experiences grew a desire to motivate and mobilize others to serve, so in 1992 he founded Heart to Heart International. Heart to Heart is a medical relief organization that stages airlifts of medicines and medical supplies to needy countries, responds to disasters, and organizes volunteer medical teams who work throughout the world. Heart to Heart has now become one of the largest volunteer relief organizations in the world.Â
As Heart to Heart grew, Dr. Morsch was giving more and more of his time to leading and building this organization. By 1995, he decided he needed to give up his private practice in order to devote more time to leading Heart to Heart. Thus, Docs Who Care  was established!
The concept for Docs Who Care really came about by accident. Here is what happened in Dr. Morsch’s own words:
I was looking for a way to work as many hours as possible in as short a time as possible, which would give me lots of time off to lead Heart to Heart. I tried moonlighting in the ED, but had a difficult time getting all my shifts in during just one week of the month. Although I enjoyed the excitement of the ED, I missed the continuity of care I’d had in my private practice. Then I tried locum tenens. Working one week out of each month was great! But I was always moving around and felt a lack of stability. Again, there was little continuity of care, since I was working here and there.
As I worked in small rural Kansas hospitals, I noticed that many of these communities had trouble either recruiting or retaining physicians.  A hospital would recruit a great doctor, but in a year or two that doctor would burn out and move on. Why? Doctors burned out because of one main thing— they were required to cover the emergency room. The ED’s in these small hospitals weren’t busy enough to warrant paid in-house ED coverage, so the few doctors who were on staff were required to cover the ED for free.  It was an endless cycle— doctors moving to town, burning out, and moving on. I named this the ‘revolving door syndrome.’ I saw that there were too many hospitals dealing with the same problem— something obviously needed to be done. Â
So I came up with a solution— Docs Who Care.  We started our first group in Larned, Kansas, in 1995. The plan? I would put together a group of 4 doctors, who would work one week each month. We would establish a family practice clinic and see patients by appointment during the day, cover the ED 24 hours a day, and admit patients to the hospital like any other doctor. One of us would always be there, so the town doctors would never have to cover the ED again. They would finally be able to practice medicine like most doctors, and not have to take on the extra burden of covering the ED as well.
The idea worked so well that our group has now become a permanent part of St. Joseph Hospital in Larned. New doctors have since moved to town, and are thriving and enjoying their practices. The revolving door has stopped. But that is only the beginning. Word spread, and soon other hospitals were calling and asking me to set up groups in their communities. The rest is history, as they say!
Docs Who Care has now worked in rural communities in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Hawaii and Utah. We’ve adapted to meet the full scope of primary care needs in the small communities we serve. We now offer a greater variety of physician scheduling to cover on selected weeks, weekends or even shorter periods of time. Today, Docs Who Care is an expanding group of motivated, high-quality providers. We nave never lost sight of our founding goals— to provide high-quality doctors to community hospitals, and to give these doctors an opportunity to work on a job-sharing basis, allowing them the time and flexibility to make a difference in the world through volunteer service.
