Bristol South District Medical Society

WALTHAM – Dr. Matthew Bivens, an emergency medicine physician from New Bedford, has been honored by the Bristol South District Medical Society as their 2025 Community Clinician of the Year awardee for his long-term service to his patients, his hospital, and the community.

Bivens has worked full-time in the St. Luke’s Hospital emergency department since 2013 and has also been the hospital’s EMS medical director since then. He also works at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and provides medical direction for 911 response services throughout the region, including New Bedford’s police, fire and EMS. He is an instructor in clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2017, he was recognized as “Physician of the Year” by the Greater New Bedford / Fall River EMS Council.

That year, he was also named “Southcoast Man of the Year” by The Standard Times, in recognition of work to improve trauma and opioid addiction care. Since 2018, he has served on the state’s Medical Services Committee, which guides the design of 911 medical treatment protocols. From 2018 to 2023 he served on the national board of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a Nobel Prize-winning organization that advocates the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

Prior to medical school, Bivens worked as a journalist. He was a foreign correspondent in Russia, where he lived for nine years and reported for The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times. He became fluent in Russian and helped set up and run Russian media, including The Moscow Times, an English-language daily newspaper, and Vedomosti, today Russia’s leading business newspaper. As a journalist, he interviewed the captain and crew of the K-19 nuclear submarine, and his account of their 1961 disaster was later made into a Hollywood movie starring Harrison Ford.

He interacted with leading Russian figures — from Mikhail Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin (then a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg) to the president of war-time Chechnya — and reported on unsecured nuclear weapons and the dangers of accidental or intentional nuclear wars. Most significantly for his future career, he covered the war in Chechnya for the Los Angeles Times. During two months in that war zone, he saw trauma and battlefield injuries that kindled his interest in becoming a physician.

WALTHAM – Dr. Erron Plosker, a recently retired board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist practicing in Fall River, now a practicing Wound Care Specialist at Southcoast Charlton and St. Lukes Hospitals, has been honored by the Bristol South District Medical Society as their 2024 Community Clinician of the Year awardee.

Dr. Plosker earned his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. and completed OB-GYN training in Los Angeles, California at the LA County USC Medical Center, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He has over 40 years of OB-GYN private practice, before deciding to transition to a new specialty.

Dr. Plosker is recognized for his ongoing commitment and care to his patients and to his community.