Once a kennel boy at his dad’s veterinary practice in St. Louis, Dr. Jeffrey Dierberg grew up thinking he wanted to be a veterinarian.
“I was interested in medicine. I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian and another kennel boy I was friends with, we went to the University of Missouri … both going to be veterinarians,” Dierberg says. “After the first semester, we both decided to be doctors … we decided we wanted to talk to our patients.”
While growing up, Dierberg worked many different jobs.
“My uncle gave me a job in the stores bagging groceries and my other uncle has a lot of banks, so I would be a teller,” he says. “And he was on the board at this little, small hospital in St. Louis … and he let me every year work part-time going through different departments … I got to work with all types of people growing up, which served me well.”
Dierberg earned his medical degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He completed a residency in plastic surgery and fellowship training in hand and microvascular surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin (Froedtert Memorial Hospital) in Milwaukee. He also completed a residency in general surgery at Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit.
Dierberg is board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery.
Health care reform loomed large when Dierberg started looking for work in the early 1990s.
“Everybody was scared, and nobody was hiring,” he says. “So I reached out to some of the people in St. Louis that I knew were in my class, and they said, ‘Jeff, I can hire you, but I can’t get you on the panels at the hospitals, but you’ll make it eventually.’”
An opportunity finally came, and Dierberg joined a private group of plastic surgeons in Green Bay.
He’s since moved on to Plastic Surgery & Skin Specialists by BayCare Clinic, seeing patients in Kaukauna.
Dierberg’s primary goal for patient care is to educate people with easy-to-understand information that will allow them to make better health-care decisions.
“I like the relationships that I have, like with breast cancer patients because it is usually multiple steps and you get to know these people and you get to help them through something,” he says. “So, I always think, well, how would I want to be treated? ... I have a long-term goal in my mind and what I am trying to get to, and I don’t like short cuts. I want to get to that long-term goal.”
In his free time, Dierberg enjoys spending time with his wife and their dog. He also takes pleasure in many hobbies. His most current obsession is fishing.