Much has changed in St. Albert since Dr. Ken Chow started his career at the Grandin Medical Clinic. There was no St. Albert Place back then, the Ducky Dome was still around, and the Sturgeon Hospital on was on what is now McKenney Avenue.
CAT scanners were rare back then, and there were long waits to get scans done, Chow recalled this month.
“Now we’ve got lots of CAT scanners and the wait times are just as bad!” he said, with a chuckle.
Chow, 76, stepped down as a full-time doctor at the Grandin Clinic on July 1, 2025, exactly 50 years after he started his career there in family medicine. He’s now working part-time and will fully retire in about three months.
Chow is the longest-serving doctor still active in St. Albert today and the longest-serving member of the Grandin Clinic. He said he might also be the longest-serving doctor in this community’s history.
“Even though I still enjoy seeing patients … I do not enjoy the paperwork and the bureaucracy,” he said, when asked why he decided to retire.
Chow officially informed his roughly 1,400 patients of his retirement earlier this year, sending many scrambling to find new doctors. Grandin Clinic has yet to find a replacement for him and Dr. Darcy Zalasky (who has also retired and had an even longer patient list).
Chow said this was part of a provincewide shortage of family doctors driven by poor pay, the labour-intensive nature of family medicine, and the province’s decision to unilaterally rip up its master agreement with the Alberta Medical Association in 2020. He hoped the province’s new pay model would encourage more family doctors to stay in Alberta. He noted that several doctors had come to St. Albert in recent months to help take on his and Zalasky’s patients.
Changing medicine
Chow said his family came to Canada when he was five years old and initially settled in Ontario. A people person with an interest in science, he decided to become a doctor and earned his degree from the University of Alberta in 1973. A friend told him the Grandin Clinic was recruiting, so he signed up with them and has been there ever since.
Family doctors did it all back in those days, Chow recalled, from delivering babies to running the Sturgeon Hospital.
“We used to get up early in the morning, make our rounds of patients in the hospital, then come down to the clinic,” he said.
Chow said hospitals now have dedicated in-house doctors and specialists, which has vastly improved patient care.
Family medicine was much more about direct examination and conversation with patients back then, he continued. Today, doctors make much more use of blood tests and other diagnostic tools such as artificial intelligence.
“I don’t think [AI] will ever replace a human that’s going to sit down and talk to you,” he added, as doing so captures nuances computers currently cannot.
Surf’s up?
Fellow Grandin Clinic member Dr. Ashan Fernando said he trained under Chow as a student, and called him a mentor to everyone at the clinic.
“I would describe him as an exemplary physician,” he said, one who is admired in the community for his knowledge and dedication.
“He leaves big shoes to fill.”
Retired doctor Jim Bell, who worked with Chow at Grandin Clinic for about 40 years, said the two of them shared a passion for windsurfing, and would often bring their cars to work with their windsurfers strapped to the roofs, ready to zip off to surf if the wind was right.
“At times Ken actually changed into his wetsuit in the office, ran into patients on the way out of the office, and ended up going back [inside] in his wetsuit in order to treat them,” Bell said.
Chow said he plans to spend time with his grandchildren and on the golf course and tennis court in his retirement. He thanked his family and his colleagues and patients at the Grandin Clinic for their years of support.
“There are patients I’ve delivered [as babies] that are now 49 years old and I’m the only doctor they’ve ever known,” he noted.
“To watch them grow up and become mature, responsible, productive adults is very, very fulfilling.”
