MCHI welcomes new family physician

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Omaha native excited to be serving rural Nebraskans

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  • Dr. Sean Flor began his new role Monday as a family physician at Memorial Community Health in Aurora.
    Dr. Sean Flor began his new role Monday as a family physician at Memorial Community Health in Aurora.
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Sean Flor grew up in north Omaha dreaming of one day being a military aviator and a doctor, perhaps not realizing he would eventually do both.
After completing an eight-year tenure in the United States Air Force, where he flew on B-1B bombers as a weapon systems officer, Flor turned his attention to medicine and will begin working this week as a member of the family medicine team at Memorial Health Clinic in Aurora.
“My two big dreams in terms of service and making the best use of myself in life were to be a military aviator and to be a physician,” Dr. Flor shared as he prepared to begin his new role at MCHI. “I always wanted to be a kiddy doctor when I was growing up because I loved my pediatrician and that’s what I aspired to be.”
Enrolled initially in the pre-med program at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisc., Flor said he realized he wasn’t ready to pursue that course of study just yet, so he majored in psychology, graduating in 1998.
“I stayed in Milwaukee for a few years after I graduated and worked with autistic children and that sort of thing, so I’ve always kind of been interested in the health and behavioral sciences,” he said. “I just knew I wasn’t ready for and I certainly didn’t have the education at that point to jump right into the medical field.”
Recalling his childhood dreams of becoming an aviator, Flor said he walked into a recruiters office one day in Milwaukee and started the process of getting into the Air Force through officer training school. The year was 2001, though he said he had made that decision before the historic events of 9/11.
“I had actually started the process before 9/11 happened, but that made me even more gung-ho to kind of get in and contribute,” he recalled. 
In the Air Force, Flor ended up becoming a strike navigator, getting specialized training to employ weapons systems. After eight years in the Air Force, including three combat tours to Southwest Asia, he decided to pursue his other dream of becoming a doctor, enrolling in a post-baccalaureate premedical program at American University in Washington, D.C. He eventually returned to his home state, earning a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha in 2019.
Though his initial dream was to become a pediatrician, Flor said he realized during his studies at UNMC that he wanted to serve a broader age range of patients.
“I found out pretty quickly that I just enjoyed the width of scope of treating the entire age spectrum and the variety that family medicine, general medicine brings,” he said. “Once I decided that I was probably going to go into family medicine, I could just tell by talking to mentors and doing some rotations that small-town family medicine is the kind of medicine that attracted me the most because it’s where you can do the most and make the biggest difference.”
Having grown up in Omaha, Flor said he has had connections to rural Nebraska all his life, as his father was raised on a farm near Valley and the family had some recreational hunting property near Ainsworth. He knew he wanted to practice medicine in a small town, so then it was just a matter of finding a community that fit his situation the best.
That town turned out to be Aurora.
“We just kind of stumbled on the town itself, to be honest,” Flor said of he and his fiancé Jess Kinser’s decision to move to Aurora. “But once we did we were really excited about it. For a town its size, Aurora is very progressive, very youthful in its thinking, there is a lot of diversity of industry and we heard nothing but amazing things about the schools. And, it’s still within shouting distance of Lincoln and Omaha, which is where my fiancé and I kind of have a lot of family. It’s on Interstate 80, it’s connected really well to the rest of the state and still being a critical access hospital, which is very attractive to me. We just really enjoyed the people right away and felt like it is a really attractive community.”
After completing his residency at Lincoln Family Medicine Residency Program, Flor has been a family medicine physician at Jefferson Community Health & Life in Fairbury for the past year and a half.  He is board certified in family medicine and will play a role in increasing the availability of appointments for primary care within the clinic setting. 
“I am excited to be joining MCHI and look forward to getting to know Aurora and the surrounding communities,” he said.  “It is a vibrant and flourishing area which will be fun to explore and we are eager to become a part of the community.”  
“I love family medicine because I enjoy interacting with the entire age spectrum and bringing an upbeat, positive approach to building the doctor-patient relationship with every person I meet in the exam room or hospital setting,” he added. “I also thrive on the variety and wide scope of this discipline and love that for a part of the day, I might be seeing clinic patients, and, in the same day I might be making nursing home rounds, seeing hospital patients, or doing procedures.”
Flor and his fiancé, who recently left a job as vice president of marketing and communications for Farmer’s Mutual of Nebraska to join the Nebraska state AARP office, were engaged in December and are planning to be married later this year. The couple has purchased a home in Aurora and looks forward to getting involved in the community.
“We were really struggling to find many good options so we were lucky that this kind of fell in our laps,” Flor said. “We felt like there is a divine power at work on that, which was terrific. We’re both runners and we love the trail, we love the park and we plan on spending a lot of time outside. It just seems like a vibrant community that just fits us, so we’re excited to be here.”
He is also a big sports fan in general, particularly of Husker athletics and Marquette University basketball.
Flor, whose first official day on the job was Monday, will be the guest of honor at a meet and greet open house hosted by MCHI on Jan. 25 from 4-6 p.m. at Memorial Hospital’s conference room, 1423 7th St. Several medical providers who have recently joined MCHI’s healthcare team will also be present.
“We are looking forward to adding Dr. Flor to our team,” commented Justin Wolf, MCHI’s CEO. “His leadership and family medicine experience will be a great addition not only to our organization, but to the community as a whole.” 
For more information, visit www.memorialcommunityhealth.org.