Women Leaving Medicine

Slowing the Physician Brain Drain

I wrote my Women Leaving Medicine Manifesto with the encouragement of a small Mastermind group I’ve belonged to this summer.

Since the Manifesto represents my most pared-down thinking on a big topic, I plan to write a series of articles, each dedicated to one point of the document.

So here goes…

Point Number 1: Slowing the Physician Brain Drain is vital to the well-being of our society.

As a family physician who quit clinical practice over a decade ago, I am part of the group of doctors who have left medical practice in increasing numbers for any number of reasons.

Frustration - “too much red tape”, inadequate business training and skills
Lack of professional satisfaction
Lifestyle challenges
Unable to make ends meet (yes, it’s surprising to hear how many doctors quit practice because their overhead, including student loan debt and malpractice insurance, exceeds their practice revenues)
Burn-out
Boredom

While it serves my coaching business to help physicians transition successfully from practice to new and exciting non-clinical careers or entrepreneurial business ventures, I am increasingly troubled by what life will be like when there aren’t enough doctors around to take care of our future medical needs.

Sure, as a physician, I and my family are likely to be able to get excellent medical care should we need it, but what about the less fortunate, or the jobless? And what about the quality of care?

I believe that we must find ways to help physicians stay in clinical practice, and to remake medicine into the once-enticing profession for intelligent and driven young people that it was. Even if doctors choose to work only part-time.

And this work must:

• be emotionally rewarding
• be efficient, as opposed to pen-pushing, wasteful, redundant “busy work” (more than anything else, this is what drove me out of practice)
• offer intellectual stimulation, along with the opportunity for personal growth
• respect the needs of the clinician to attend to the personal demands on his or her time
• be financially rewarding
• be designed creatively to take advantage of the huge array of technological tools we now have, enabling people to work virtually at least some of the time
• restore the trust and “magic” of the beneficent doctor-patient relationship about which I recall taking an oath way too many years ago in medical school!

We can’t sustain this loss of doctors for long.

How can we physicians help stem the brain drain?

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