By Mari-Len De Guzman
When Dr. Alex Bartel first hung his sign in Chilliwack in 1977, general practice meant house calls, hospital rounds, and knowing every doctor in town by name. Half a century later, the local medical landscape looks vastly different, but Bartel’s core belief has not changed: good medicine is about people and community.
Today, the good doctor is not quite retired but has stepped back from full-time family practice. Instead, his schedule now consists of office locums, hospital shifts and community clinic work.
Dr. Alex Bartel celebrates 50 years in family medicine.
September 2026 marks 50 years in medicine for Bartel. While his days look a little different now, remaining active in clinical care, albeit at a scaled-back pace, is what keeps him grounded. He says maintaining connections with his peers is key to transitioning smoothly into retirement.
“I’m still doing some hospital work primarily because it’s connecting me to my medical community, and I think we all need community. We all need some support,” Bartel says.
His locum work also provides a similar type of fulfillment. Between covering private practice panels, picking up hospital duties, and working shifts at the non-profit Ruth and Naomi Clinic, Bartel is happy to step in wherever there is a need.
For him, locuming is not about maintaining a heavy patient load but about being a reliable set of hands for peers who need a break, and offering a reassuring presence to patients navigating their health journeys.
“I’m not doing this for income now; it’s more like, ‘Who can I help?’ It’s more about helping, it’s about being connected, it’s about community,” Bartel says.
Old-school values in modern practice
Over his five decades in Chilliwack, Bartel’s impact and leadership extended beyond his clinic walls. Throughout his career, he has taken on leadership roles that helped shape the local health-care dynamic. He served as chief of staff at Chilliwack General Hospital, managed physician credentialing for Fraser Health, and served as medical director for care facilities including Valley Haven, Cascade and Waverly.
Practicing in the same city for the last 50 years has given Bartel front row seats through five decades of evolution in family practice.
Reflecting on his early years as a doctor in Chilliwack, he recalls just how broad general practice used to be — when hospital rounds were part of the daily routine and after-hours house calls were the norm.
“When you go into somebody’s house, you see how they live. You see their family, you see what’s on the walls, you see the environment. You learn things about a person in five minutes in their home that you would never learn sitting across a desk in an office,” Bartel says.
Health care has changed dramatically since 1977, he notes, witnessing primary care shift from solo practices with heavy hospital involvement, toward specialized practices, walk-in clinics and modern team-based practices.
While the delivery of care looks much different today, Bartel emphasizes the core of the profession hasn’t changed. For him, family medicine still comes down to simple, timeless principles: listening, being honest, and building genuine connections with patients.
“I hope that with every interaction you have with a patient, they feel at least you’re in their corner,” Bartel advises new physicians. He adds patients should be able to leave their family doctor feeling they have been heard and that their “story” is validated.
“I’m very much into supporting people on their journey,” he says.
Supporting that journey also requires honesty and humility.
In this era of information overload, patients would sometimes go to their family doctor having already Googled their symptoms or conditions. Rather than feel challenged when patients arrive with their own research, Bartel views it as an opportunity for collaboration.“We used to think we had to fix everything or tell people what to do.
Now it’s much more about coming alongside people,” he notes. “If patients come in and they’ve looked up stuff on the internet, and they come in with a diagnosis, I don’t feel threatened by that. I’d say, ‘Great, let’s look at that together.’”
“I often tell young doctors, ‘You don’t have to know everything.’ It’s okay to say to a patient, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but let me figure it out with you.’ That takes a load off your shoulders, and patients actually appreciate the honesty.”
Rebuilding connections
Beyond patient care, Bartel emphasizes the value of peer connection. Decades in medical practice has taught him that isolation can be a quick path to physician burnout.
“In the old days, you knew all the doctors in town… You saw them in the hallway at the hospital, you sat in the doctors’ lounge and had a cup of coffee and talked about cases or just chatted. You knew what was going on in each other’s lives,” he recalls.
Today, with many physicians working exclusively in private clinics or specialized streams, that previously built-in daily contact is no longer the norm. To help fill that gap, Bartel has been actively revitalizing the Chilliwack Medical Society, the local association for medical doctors in Chilliwack.
The society is not a new organization. In fact, this Chilliwack “doctors’ group” predates Fraser Health and the Chilliwack Division of Family Practice, Bartel notes. While it had gone dormant through the years, Bartel believes the Chilliwack Medical Society has an important role to play, particularly in strengthening social and professional peer connections.
“Chilliwack has the advantage in that we — the GPs and the specialists — have always got along well from way back, and we just kept nurturing that sense of community,” Bartel says.
The goal, at the very least, is to be a place where physicians can get together regularly for food, coffee, conversations and everything in-between. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in practice or retired or semi-retired or doing locums. It’s a place to stay connected,” he says.
The society can also serve as a tool for recruitment, Bartel notes. With a supportive medical society for doctors to find a fulfilling medical career, Chilliwack can be a highly attractive destination for new physicians, he adds.
Bartel recalls an interaction with a surgeon years ago who had a high-stress moment in the operating room.
“I said to him, ‘Around here, you never have to have a crisis all by yourself. There are lots of people around who’ll step in any time to support you.’ We’re all in this together.”