Having Second Thoughts?

In 2018, I started looking for a way to leave family practice.

After 15 years as a full time family physician I was still the last doctor to leave at the end of the day, still doing charting and paperwork at home on weeknights and weekends, still taking 6 weeks to get forms done. The constant feeling of unfinished business any time I sat on the couch or had time off.

Unfinished charts and piles of dictation from discharged patients.

I was worn out, felt badgered and felt hopelessly out of control.

I started observing physician friends who had side gigs - within medicine or outside medicine. Even watched some leave medicine to do totally new careers.

I was certainly disappointed with my skills in time management and unpredictable finish times and never having that sense of accomplishment and or completion.

The inboxes and task lists felt overwhelming, constantly refilling.

I started looking for help, a coach a mentor, ways others survived in this career.

I wanted to know how others survived this. 

I started attending Panel Management Courses to see if this would help me be more efficient. Instead, I felt like more of a disappointment, they had an ideal image of providing great family physician care such as: physicians getting today's work done today, having the third next available appointment within 3-5 days, minimizing your patients seeing other providers to get improved continuity of care and reducing poor patient outcomes.

With my waiting list and unmanaged inboxes; these targets were so far out of my reach, it felt overwhelming to even consider how to do that.

I kept looking and there weren't any family physicians who are trained as a life coach to teach other family physicians how to solve these daily issues within our career. But I wanted and needed help.

I found a life coach and came with these goals: I wanted to be home on time and have a predictable day. I wanted to stop being a disappointment in my own eyes.

As physicians, we all have the same stresses - interruptions, inboxes, forms, access, scheduling, patients, staff, family commitments, time to complete exercise, what to eat, questioning our skills, making hundreds of decisions daily.

Sometimes it seems like leaving this career would make all our problems go away. Right? Nope, every career has problems and challenges.

The good news is that it is possible to feel better and learn to have a new and improved strategy for your clinical day.