SLIPPERY ROCK — Dr. Michael McDonald of Slippery Rock may have retired last month after 30 years of practicing family medicine, but that doesn’t mean he’s putting his feet up on his desk.

He’s still got his overseas mission work through the nonprofit group Meeting God in Missions, and he's still the longtime girls basketball coach at Portersville Christian School.

A family practice physician, McDonald was part of the BHS Primary Care, Slippery Rock Family Medicine.

He described family practices as dealing with patients of all ages with a focus on preventative medicine. He called it a full spectrum of medicine.

For 28 years, McDonald has tended to patients in Slippery Rock.

“I’ve seen patients who were children, who’ve grown up and had their own children — mutiple generations of people,” he said.

“Dr. McDonald is an outstanding family medicine physician who set up a practice in Slippery Rock when the community had a great need, and spent his entire career there. He has served the community and Butler Health System for many years, making innumerable contributions to the hospital and to patients’ lives,” said Ken DeFurio, president and CEO of Butler Health System. “The BHS family thanks Dr. McDonald for his service, loyalty, commitment, and dedication to his patients and great care. We wish him and his family the very best.”

“I’m a Christian. I really wanted to do some more ministry-related things that would be different from what I’m doing,” said McDonald.

“I’m vice president of an overseas mission organization, and I wanted to be more involved in that, as well as local ministries,” said McDonald.

And he wants to spend more time with the basketball team.

A high school basketball player, McDonald began coaching younger players at Portersville when his daughter became involved with the team in 2005.

“With one or two years off, I’ve been coaching ever since,” he said.

“I just wanted to spend more time with them, give more of my energy to being girls basketball coach,” he said.

And he plans to go on a weeklong mission, one of many he’s undertaken in the 25 years he’s been involved with Meeting God in Missions, in April to the Dominican Republic.

McDonald said his desire to be of service to the community hasn’t changed, but medicine had.

“I wanted to do something else,” said McDonald. “Medicine is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago. I felt it was time to retire.”

He said practicing medicine has changed since he started 30 years ago. After growing up in Edinboro, McDonald went to West Virginia University in Morgantown for his undergraduate degree, as well as medical school.

Upon graduation, he had a family practice in West Virginia for 11 years.

“I started from scratch as a solo practitioner with no patients at all,” said McDonald. After 10 years he took on a partner and eventually another associate.

McDonald said he was recruited by Butler Hospital to come to Slippery Rock in 1992.

“From 2001 to 2018 we were affiliated with Butler Health System. In 2011, we officially became employees and sold the practice to the system in 2021,” he said.

“The biggest change is medicine has become much more of a template, meaning everything is structured,” he said. “You follow algorithms.

“There are metrics and templates for a patient. It’s very protocol-driven and less patient-cenric,” said McDonald.

McDonald added, “It’s not the way when I started out 30 years ago. I spend much more time online now than I ever did, and that’s not why I wanted to go into medicine.

“I think technology has been beneficial in a lot of ways, and certainly a lot of advances in medicine have occurred. Electronic records, although largely in my opinion, has been a detriment to patient care, although it has some advantages,” he said.

Still, his career has influenced his family. His wife, Lauren, is a nurse. His son, Benjamin, is a pharmacist in State College, while his daughter, Mary, is a physician’s assistant at a family practice in western New York, near Erie.

“I expect that’s kind of what they grew up with,” McDonald said. “We didn’t push them to go into these things, but that’s what they grew up with for sure.”

McDonald said he can remember the first patient he ever treated, an elderly lady who came to him with dizziness, and the last patient he saw, a man who came in to have a biopsy of a skin lesion.

“I know it’s time. If feels like the right thing to do. I’m very comfortable with it. I’m excited to see what life has,” he said.