Dr. Chris Williams and his family are thrilled with the opportunity to join Memorial Hospital of Carbon County in providing healthcare services to Saratoga. With 20 years of clinical practice and a lifetime of rural experience, the Platte Valley is the perfect location for Dr. Williams and his family to settle and enjoy a wonderful community experience. Dr. Williams’s wife, Briana, is an outstanding musician, teacher, coach, and community supporter. She has enjoyed raising the family’s 8 children and loves the opportunities smaller communities offer. Their three adult children are excited to enjoy visits to Carbon County and the five younger kids are chomping at the bit with hopes of joining the Saratoga schools and participating in numerous activities and events.
Dr. Williams was raised in a small town in the Texas Hill Country where, at an early age, he began guiding expeditions of rock climbers, explorers, backpackers, and river runners to adventures in Wyoming as well as Colorado, Alaska, and other western states and also Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and South America. After graduating from high school with 64 classmates in a wonderful rural community, he spent two years providing voluntary ministerial service in Western England and Southern Wales before studying zoology at Brigham Young University.
After 10 years of guiding outdoor adventures, he attended medical school at one of the leading institutions in the West, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas. He trained in an excellent family medicine residency program associated with Methodist Hospitals of Dallas. This training has provided excellent preparation for the last two decades of rural healthcare experiences. Dr. Williams has led emergency rooms, clinics, hospitals, and other rural healthcare facilities in South Texas, the Eastern Plains of Colorado, and Northwestern Colorado. He has loved his patients and the communities that he has served and is deeply missed by those for whom he has cared. However, he has worked for 20 years with the goal of an opportunity like Saratoga and is prepared to channel his experience and passion into this once in a lifetime opportunity. He loves general family medicine and has an affinity for care of children, adolescents, and young adults. He especially enjoys sports medicine and medical involvement with young athletes. He has a real talent for balancing the care of complex medical patients by managing many conditions and partnering with specialists to allow care for complex issues while minimizing need to travel as frequently for some patients. He loves caring for the whole patient and knows the calving schedule, high school basketball successes, stock market prices, and many other issues present in rural communities that have significant effects on the health of his patients and loves to be involved with and in discussion of such things as appropriate at each visit. He has found joy in providing palliative care as a hospice physician and has served as a hospice director.
The Williams family greatly enjoys being involved in their community in many ways. Chris and Briana are delighted to coach sports teams when needed and to cheer the local children from the bleachers when not needed. They have enjoyed coaching championship teams at the high school varsity level, but have equally loved providing great opportunities to beginning youngsters learning new sports. They have coached football, soccer, wrestling, basketball, baseball, softball, track and field, and swimming. Briana has directed town community choirs, bands, and school choirs as well as leading drama and musical productions. They avidly attend and actively serve in their faith groups. They have served on community leadership boards when needed and provided leadership in Mathcounts, Destination Imagination, academic competitions, 4H groups, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts.
The family loves golfing, swimming, travelling, camping, biking, floating, skiing, and exploring. At times, they become rabid fans of college and some professional sports. Some of the family’s fondest memories have occurred at War Memorial Stadium on Jonah Field, and they are excited to be close to Laramie with the expectation that they will enjoy several more outstanding events there. The two children who will enter junior high grades at Saratoga have studied the local teams and schedules in depth and are anxious to join the outstanding programs. We all anticipate jumping into the community with both feet and are excited to establish wonderful memories and experiences with patients, neighbors and friends in Saratoga.