Care for the whole family

The thing Brian Murphy likes best about the Iowa Family Practice is the variety of treatments his patients receive.

'I like being a jack of all trades,” he said. 'One day I was treating a newborn in one room while a 101-year old woman was waiting to be seen in the next room.”

Murphy is an ARNP, an Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner, both family and emergency certified. He was recruited from Sigourney in 2018 and located in a building at 305 West Main Street in Washington. At the present time he is the only one in the building, spending about three days a week there, alternating his time in the emergency room at the Washington County Hospital. But he said he's open to growing the practice and adding staff.

He provides a wide variety of services to patients ranging from wellness visits to biopsies to suturing to inoculations to diabetic care to birth control and much more.

His decision to choose Washington was made in part because his wife Sonya grew up here. The two met while in the Army in 1992. They were married in 1993 and moved to Washington in 1998. Murphy worked at the hospital here while completing his education at the University of Iowa.

He recently completed this third RAGBRAI. 'When I first heard about it, I thought it was crazy. But after my first ride, I was hooked,” he said. This year he met riders from New Zealand and Australia. He said the experience of dipping his bike's front tire in the Mississippi River after riding across the entire state gave him a feeling of accomplishment that is hard to describe.