It was always Kevin Ingram’s plan to come home to practice medicine.

“When I started into medicine that’s what I wanted to do, come back,” Ingram said.

He and his wife were both from the Miss-Lou, and when home beckoned, Ingram decided to do his residency at LSU in a community-based program in anticipation of coming back to the area, he said.

Ingram is a family practitioner, but Radiologist Kathryn Nutter said she had similar reasons for working in Natchez.

“I grew up in Natchez, as did my husband,” Nutter said. “Our family is still here, and our friends are still in the area.

“We loved our small town growing up and thought it would be a great experience for our child.”

She is a 1993 Trinity Episcopal graduate who went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Mississippi State University before starting medical school at the University Medical Center in Jackson.

And after doing her residency in Jackson, working in the medical community in a small town has its benefits, Nutter said.

Now, Nutter spends a typical workday in a small, dark office staring at MRI scans on computer monitors — she keeps the office lights turned off so she can see more detail in the images. Nutter evaluates 40 to 50 scans on most days. She also reads PET and CT scans for Natchez Regional Medical Center and is proud to provide a service to local physicians.

“You get more direct contact with the referring physicians here,” Nutter said. “It is really easy to get in contact with everybody at a local level.”

In a larger metro, it might not be easy to contact a referring physician, who a doctor may not even know, Nutter said.

There’s also the benefit of doctors having a more intimate rapport with their patients, Ingram said.

“Here, things are a little more up close and personal,” Ingram said. “It’s people I grew up with or people who watched me grow up.”

Likewise, the Miss-Lou has a lot of dedicated doctors who have lived and worked in the area for years, Nutter said.

But it’s not perfect.

As one who is often a referring physician, Ingram said the area’s offering of specialists is rare.

“(The medical community) is great in the sense that we have so many specialties in such a small community,” he said. “It is unheard of, even in larger areas, to have the number of good specialists we do.”

Even with that concentration of specialists, it’s not enough, Nutter said.

“I think that we are definitely in need of some specialty positions, and we could always use any number of physicians, whether general or specialized,” Nutter said.

And it’s not always easy to recruit a new doctor who is not from the area to come and stay for good, Ingram said.

“We are losing a few physicians right now and there are not any that are replacing them,” he said. “There are only so many (patients) you can see in a day.”

But business is good, and the small town atmosphere make it worth it, Nutter said.

“I definitely like my lack of a commute,” she said.