Beach grew up in Greenville, N.C., and hung around the Emergency Room at Pitt Memorial Hospital, where her mother, a 1944 graduate of the N.C. Baptist Hospital School of Nursing, was head nurse. Beach grew up hearing stories about her mother’s student years in Winston-Salem during World War II, and stories of fascinating events in the ER.
Beach attended East Carolina University on an academic scholarship, majoring in biology, before going to what was then Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University. She remained at N.C. Baptist Hospital for her pediatric residency and was certified by the American Board of Pediatrics in 1982.
Initially, she had a small-town pediatric practice in LaGrange, Ga., followed by an Atlanta HMO practice with Kaiser Permanente. She loved general pediatric practice, getting to know her patients and watching them grow up. She developed expertise in treating child abuse and neglect, testified in court in over 50 cases, developed training programs for law enforcement groups and helped start the Child Protection Program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She received the Crystal Gavel Award from Cobb County, Ga., for her work in this area. She was associate medical director with Kaiser Permanente and sat on Kaiser’s National Quality Board. In the 1990s, hospital medicine became a specialty and Beach helped develop the hospital teams for Kaiser Permanente.
She then spent the rest of her career associated with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, a 700-bed, three-hospital tertiary care pediatric hospital system. She was vice president of quality, specializing in creating evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. She spent the last 20 years of her practice as a pediatric hospitalist at Children’s at Scottish Rite. She lectured at the national Pediatric Hospital Medicine Conference for many years on topics such as the art of diagnosis, diagnostic dilemmas and unusual illnesses in hospitalized children. She served as guest editor for Atlanta Medicine, a magazine that reaches several thousand Atlanta-area doctors.
She was a faculty member at Emory University School of Medicine and Morehouse School of Medicine, instructing medical students and pediatric residents. She is known for her teaching skills, having received the Teacher of the Year Award from Morehouse’s pediatric residents. The 2021 Shaffner Symposium at Children’s Healthcare was given in Beach’s honor, and in 2023, she was named a master clinician at the inaugural Dr. Joseph Snitzer Master Clinician Series.
Since retiring in 2021, she has turned to writing. Her book “Sick Kids: Solving Medical Mysteries in Children” contains 50 short chapters, each sharing the true story of a child who was admitted to the hospital with one diagnosis and went home with a different one. She also writes a blog (www.annfbeach.com) on medical and medical-adjacent topics. She has performed onstage as an improv comedian and shoots sporting clays with a women’s group, the Annie Oakleys.
She lives in Atlanta, Ga., with her husband, John, and they have a son and daughter-in-law who live near them.