Dr. Maurice Geurts has joined the staff of Grace Cottage Family Health, and he comes with a wealth of experience. Born in Heerlen, Holland, Dr. Geurts (it rhymes with your “hurts” that he will do his best to cure!) is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam Medical School. He met his wife, Molly, a native of Portland, Oregon, while she was working in Amsterdam, and the two married in 1994. “At the time,” said Dr. Geurts, “I was working for an organization that transported Dutch citizens if they’d been injured or had become ill while abroad. I’d go get them and bring them back home, so I traveled all over the world.”

Molly & Dr. Maurice, Alex, Ella & Jack Geurts

After the Geurts’s daughter, Ella, was born and Molly was pregnant with twins, the family moved to the tiny nation of Malawi, in southeast Africa. Four months later, Dr. Geurts delivered the twins, as he had delivered Ella, but under different circumstances. “I asked someone who was cleaning in the hospital room to go and get me some delivery tools, and she never returned! Fortunately, Alex arrived with no problems, and by the time we had to use a vacuum pump to get Jack out, someone else had arrived with the equipment we needed!”

For over three years, Dr. Geurts ran a 200-bed hospital in Malawi. “Every day, there would be 300-400 patients lined up outside the hospital to see a doctor. People didn’t come in for minor aches and pains—they waited until something was really serious before they would come to us. Once a week, I also traveled to outlying clinics. It was frustrating because there were so many people who needed medical help, and very little in the way of equipment or medicine to work with. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and dengue fever were widespread.”

After 3 1/2 years in Africa, the Geurtses decided to raise their children in the U.S., so Dr. Geurts began the University of Vermont’s three-year residency program and the family moved to St. Albans. Through a colleague, Dr. Geurts heard about Grace Cottage, and came to visit over a year ago. “I fell in love with the area, and with Grace Cottage, immediately,” said Dr. Geurts. “In healthcare, you hear this old cliché so often: ‘The patient comes first.’ The only place I’ve seen where that is actually true is at Grace Cottage! I feel very fortunate to be working here.” The Geurts family is living in nearby Grafton.

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