Women leaving medicine - a wealth of untapped training and experience?
The third bullet point in the Women Leaving Medicine Manifesto strikes at the heart of my real concern.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
“Women leaving medicine represent a great wealth of training and experience that must be tapped, to continue to benefit society”.
When women leave their time-gobbling medical practices or drop out after a grueling residency, society loses out.
While families — children, elderly parents, siblings — may benefit (as may the physician herself even if she isn’t caring for a family), the huge investment of time, energy and money that went into a medical education and establishing a practice is wasted.
Or so it seems to the onlooker, and even to the physician herself who is often riddled with guilt and confusion.
This loss is most unfortunate in a time when the healthcare system is straining at the seams and talk of impending physician shortages is widespread.
Just what’s at stake here?
- the physician’s mental, emotional and physical well-being
- the security and integrity of her family — the infant still forming attachments, the toddler in search of new independence knowing that his mommy is there to back him up, the elementary school kid struggling with homework, the adolescent craving support as she navigates the minefields of middle and high school, her mom’s early-onset dementia dad is having to cope with, her dad’s colon cancer that is causing mom and her siblings to fall apart
- the physician’s financial situation should she choose to quit medical practice - unrelenting medical school debt repayment, loss of income to the family
- the health and welfare of a society that is under stress due to overwork, underemployment, poor lifestyle choices, increasingly sedentary occupations and leisure choices, information overload … you name it!
In this blog, I hope to explore along with you, what opportunities we have as individual women physicians and as a community or society to address this problem.
I guess my first questions are:
- Is there indeed a problem?
- Do the women leaving medicine really care if their ‘brain trusts’ and years of experience lie fallow for the years they take off?
- And if so, how should we respond?
What are your thoughts?
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- Americans will need doctors but physicians are leaving primary care (kevinmd.com)
- The Bureaucratic Doctor (lifescript.com)
“There are no coincidences!”
[This is a Guest Post]
“thank you ….the universe is always guiding me…and i will be very honest:
i have been out of an IM residency only six years. throughout medical school and residency i felt uncertain/not confident in my knowledge base of medicine, but i chose im by default…nothing else jumped out at me. outpatient clinic during residency was a huge disappointment (seeing pts every 10-15 minutes was not what i signed up for)….so i postponed actually practicing for about 4 yrs, and then i only got into it as nutritional/lifestyle change coach. nonetheless, i started practicing in an inner-city medicaid clinic, but after a year and a half….I’M DONE. I’M DONE, DONE, DONE!! i loved touching my pts…i loved talking to them and teaching/counseling….but i don’t care about m11q’s, disability forms, and potassium levels…..and i especially hate that these things took me away from my husband and my two babies. i was just another worker-bee, clearly fighting the hustle everyone else had down pat. but even though my heart left medicine 6 yrs ago…i feel scared to leave…..what the heck am i going to do? how am i going to help people now? if medicine was the noblest of professions, am i done for? this is all i have known since the 10th grade…..
i will end the ramble now…thank you for your patience….warmly, -yc”
