When patients ask Dr. Jeffrey Hans-Petersen what brought him to Vashon, he jokes that he’s rounding out his four-corner tour of the United States.

He went to medical school in Southern California, did his residency in Concord, N.H., and practiced medicine for five years in a clinic outside of Gainesville, Fla.

Now, however, HansPetersen, a newly hired family practice physician at the Vashon Health Center, hopes to make this fourth corner home.

“I love it here,” he said during an interview at the bustling clinic at Sunrise Ridge. “I love the friendliness.”

An outdoorsy man, HansPetersen, 36, said he relishes the fact that he can ride his bike to work and walk in the woods with his Australian shepherd Rugby.

“It’s an ideal situation,” he said.

His wife Heidi HansPetersen, who’s completing her doctorate in entomology, will be joining him after she graduates May 1. Her area of academic interest is tropical agriculture, which led them to Florida. But on Vashon, he said, she hopes to find her niche working with farmers on non-chemical approaches to pest management.

HansPetersen (his name is a combination of his last name, Hansen, and his wife’s last name, Peterson) chose family practice medicine after he explored the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. He’s interested in understanding how people make sense of their lives and thought psychiatry would be a way for him to work with people who were struggling to find their way, he said.

During medical school, however, he found that the psychiatrists he worked with mostly explored what he called “bizarre issues” and that many of their patients were given labels that had the effect of putting them in boxes.

In family medicine, he said, “you realize everyone has their own box, … and that the boxes I may be more familiar with don’t always apply to the people I see.”

That kind of medicine, he added, seemed to offer a way for him to help people with their day-to-day issues; it also seemed more interesting and “in many ways more creative,” he said.

He also said he enjoys a rural practice, something he experienced in both Florida and New Hampshire. Working far from a city, he said, requires a family practice doctor to call on a number of different skills, “rather than sending someone to a specialist immediately.”

HansPetersen was familiar with Vash-on before he applied for the job at the health center. His college roommate was Hans Blomgren, who lives on Vashon; HansPetersen visited him often over the years.

“We had a pipe dream of one day being neighbors,” HansPetersen said, smiling.

HansPetersen is joined by a new medical assistant who will be working with him. Shyla Jackson, 27, graduated in December from Everest College in Tacoma.

She said she was grateful to Rita Cannell, the clinic manager, for giving her a job straight out of school.

“The experience is just awesome to me,” she said.

Jackson is commuting from Tacoma, where her 5-year-old daughter attends school.

So far, she said, both the job and the commute are going well.

“I’m really appreciating it,” she said of her new role at the health center.