After almost 20 years of practicing family medicine, you might expect Dr. Diane Steere's routine to become, well, routine.

That's not how the medical students she takes under her wing see it. Steere is as likely to pepper her conversation with words like "joy," "love," and "relationships" as medical terms when discussing her work.

"The thing that inspired me about her was how excited she was about family medicine," KU School of Medicine-Wichita graduate Stephanie Shields said. "I had never met anybody quite that excited about it."

Steere has served as a volunteer preceptor for Shields and dozens of other KU med students doing their third-year family medicine rotations. She was given the community volunteer faculty of the year award at the school's family medicine winter symposium last month.

Her commitment to family medicine is evident in another way: she's the current president of the Kansas Academy of Family Physicians (KAFP), which represents about 1,000 doctors across the state.

Steere grew up in Michigan, earned a chemistry degree from the University of Dayton in Ohio, and then got a job doing research for the Dow Chemical Company.

"I love science and I love people, so I felt like what I really wanted was a career where I could combine the two. It was my love of relationships with people that led me to medicine."

When she enrolled at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine, she said, "I really had no idea what I wanted to specialize in. Every rotation I did, I loved, but by the end of it I was kind of bored."

"Then I got to family medicine, and that is never boring. Every time you open the exam room door, you have no idea what's waiting for you, unlike most specialties where you do the same things over and over again."

Steere was recruited to the Wichita campus' family medicine residency program at Wesley Medical Center while attending a conference in Kansas City as a medical student. She completed her residency in 1993.

She acknowledges the one other specialty that grabbed her attention: surgery. After residency, she spent three years as the attending physician in Wesley's emergency room. "I loved it," she said. "That was the surgeon in me loving that fun, fast, exciting work."

But she missed building relationships with patients, which she's been doing since 1996 as one of 11 physicians at Wichita Family Medicine Specialists in Carriage Parkway.

"My practice is classic family medicine," she said. "I have babies up to geriatrics. I have lots of five-generation families.

"As soon as she began practicing family medicine, she started welcoming third-year students as a volunteer preceptor. "Oh, I love teaching students," she said. And she definitely champions her own specialty. "Students get so confused over what they want to do in their career. There's a lot of competition to go into the higher-paid specialties, not because you have to be smarter or better but because they pay more."

"What I try to do is show them the joys of family medicine, the reward of taking care of the whole person."

Steere says, "Students are surprised about how many procedures we do, and how dynamic the practice is. You can walk in and see a baby in one room, and in the next see a patient with congestive heart failure. There are a lot of hats to put on."

"I love the students' enthusiasm," she added. "They always teach me something, too. There are always new things in medicine."

Shields, now a first-year resident in the KU School of Medicine-Wichita's family medicine program, was already leaning toward that specialty when she got to know Steere. The experience reinforced her decision.

As Shields saw patients, "She made sure to pull me aside. She'd want to hear what I thought, and then she'd tell me whether I was right or wrong, in a nice way."

"I learned a lot from her, the way she talks to people, the way she remembers people."

"Right now KAFP is my passion and that's taking up a lot of time," Steere said. She's been active in the organization for 25 years.  In January, the organization arranges for family physicians, residents, and medical students to meet with state legislators in Topeka. Steere also has a major role in setting up the academy's annual meeting, to be held in June in Kansas.

Not that she needs to provide further evidence, but she concludes, "I love being a family doctor."