Robert Duncanson, MD, would have been a great doctor no matter what specialty he chose. It’s just fate that he’s a great pediatrician.

As a graduate of UC Riverside headed for UCLA Medical School, he figured that if medicine didn’t work out, he’d go to optometry school. When medical school turned out fine, he made plans to start a family practice. But an unexpected addition to his own family changed his course for good—and for the good.

Dr. Duncanson pursued pediatrics instead, and has spent the past 40 years or so watching generation after generation of Riverside County kids grow up healthy and strong. One of his greatest joys, in fact, is seeing the children and—hard to believe—the grandchildren of some of his earliest patients.

“Pediatrics is one of the happiest specialties,” Dr. Duncanson says, “and it makes for a pretty satisfying life. Maybe the only happier specialty is obstetrics, where you get to help people start their families.”

Dr. Duncanson is not the first in his family to appreciate the benefits of a career in medicine. His father was an optometrist and his grandfather was a family practice doctor in San Bernardino. “I guess it runs in the blood,” he says.

After earning his MD from UCLA and completing his internship and residency, Dr. Duncanson served in the U.S. Air Force at Griffiss AFB in Rome, N.Y., at the height of the Vietnam conflict, from 1967-69. He and his wife then looked at practices all over California—and ended up back in Riverside. “It had the best deal at the time,” he says, now. “We agreed to try it, we liked it, and we’ve been here ever since.”

The “we” includes Roberta, his wife of 45 years, and their three boys, now grown. Dr. Duncanson gives them a great deal of credit for his choice of specialty and for his excellence in practicing it. “In the 1960s, there was really no such thing as a family practice specialty,” he explains. “The faculty strongly advised young medical students to select internal medicine, pediatrics or some other specialty. In my first year of medical school, we had our first boy—and that made me more attentive to the pediatrics courses I was taking.”

Dr. Duncanson’s own children have made him a much more sympathetic listener when it comes to his patients’ parents. “I learned more about family dynamics by coaching a year of baseball for fifth and sixth graders than I did in my residency!” he quips. “I can see why some parents lose it. I understand now that parents have a lot of stress that maybe a young doctor with no kids might not understand. In fact, we have another pediatrician in the group who recently had his first child in his late 40s—and he’s already changed dramatically.”

The reverse is true, too. “Being a pediatrician has helped me be a better father because I’ve seen so many other kids go through the same crises as my kids,” he says. “By the time mine were going to high school and dealing with peer pressure, I understood that there are a lot of other kids struggling with similar issues. I’m more understanding about how to deal with it.”

Dr. Duncanson is pretty good at connecting with adults, too, says longtime colleague Lawrence D. Sharpe, MD, a pediatrician at Riverside Medical Clinic. “He’s very personable and very conscientious,” Dr. Sharpe says. “He’s also very thoughtful. He’s not an impulsive person. And he’s easy to talk to as a peer and colleague, and as a friend.”

Dr. Sharpe’s vantage point as a fellow pediatrician has made him privy to kind words about Dr. Duncanson that Dr. Duncanson himself may not hear. “As patients switch jobs and insurance, they often have to switch doctors. Every time I get patients who were in his office, they’re very complimentary. Dr. Duncanson has seen both sides of the fence. He knows what a professional knows, and he has been in the trenches with his own kids. I wouldn’t hesitate to take my own kids to him.”
 
Top that for a great doctor-to-doctor compliment!

Organized medicine agrees. Dr. Duncanson has been a member of the Riverside County Medical Association since 1969, serving on various committees over the years and as its president in 1997. He remains a District II Delegate to the California Medical Association House of Delegates and regularly attends meetings of the RCMA Child, Adolescent & Maternal Health Committee. He is a member of the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Los Angeles Pediatric Society. For his work with the RCMA, he will receive an award for “Outstanding Contribution to the Medical Association and Its Goals” this month.

In addition to his leadership in organized medicine, the 66-year-old has been involved in guiding Riverside Community Hospital, serving two years as chair of the Department of Pediatrics, 10 years as credentials chair and four years as chief of staff.

Obviously, Dr. Duncanson’s commitment to children and medicine runs deep. “We always encourage patients to come back,” he says. “We don’t have an automatic cutoff age, but we do tell kids that when they get married or pregnant, they need to move on. I think the most rewarding part of pediatrics is seeing kids who grew up in our practice bring their own children back. We’re working on our third generation of kids.”