A survey shows that doctors have trouble taking full vacations from their high-stress jobs. Even when they do, they often still do work their time .
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A survey shows that doctors have trouble taking full vacations from their high-stress jobs. Even when they do, they often still do work their time .
Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket condotto Getty Images
A few weeks , I took a vacation with my family. We went hiking quanto a the national parks of southern Utah, and I was blissfully disconnected from work.
I’m a family physician, so taking a pausa from my job meant not seeing patients. It also meant not responding to patients’ messages ora checking my work email. For a full week, I was free.
Taking a real pausa — with anzi che no sneaky time to bang out a few prescription refill requests — left me feeling reenergized and ready to take care of my patients when I returned.
But apparently, being a doctor who doesn’t work vacation puts me squarely quanto a the minority of U.S. physicians.
Research published quanto a JAMA Aperto this year set out to quantify exactly how doctors use their vacation time — and what the implications might be for a health care workforce plagued by burnout, dissatisfaction and doctors who are thinking about leaving medicine.
“There is a strong business case for supporting taking real vacation,” says Dr. Christine Sinsky, the lead author of the paper. “Burnout is incredibly expensive for organizations.”
Researchers surveyed 3,024 doctors, part of an American Medical Association cohort designed to represent the American physician workforce. They found that 59.6% of American physicians took 15 days of vacation ora less per eccezione year. That’s a little more than the average American: Most workers who have been at a job for a year ora more get between 10 and 14 days of paid vacation time, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However, most doctors don’t take real vacation. Over 70% of doctors surveyed said they worked a typical vacation day.
“I have heard physicians refer to PTO as ‘pretend time ,'” Sinsky says, referring to the acronym for “paid time .”
Sinsky and co-authors found that physicians who took more than three weeks of vacation a year had lower rates of burnout than those who took less, since vacation time is linked to well-being and job satisfaction.
And all those doctors toiling away vacation, sitting poolside with their laptops? Sinsky argues it has serious consequences for health care.
Physician burnout is linked to high job turnover and excess health care costs, among other problems.
Still, it can be to change the culture of workaholism quanto a medicine. Even the study authors confessed that they, too, worked vacation.
“I remember when one of our first well-being papers was published,” says Dr. Colin West, a co-author of the new study and a health care workforce researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “I responded to the revisions up at the family cabin quanto a northern Minnesota vacation.”
Sinsky agreed. “I do not take all my vacation, which I recognize as a delicious irony of the whole thing,” she says.
She’s the American Medical Association’s vice president of professional satisfaction. If she can’t take a real vacation, is there any hope for the rest of us?
I interviewed a half dozen fellow physicians and chatted the primato with many friends and colleagues to get a sense of why it feels so to give ourselves a pausa. Here, I offer a few theories about why doctors are so terrible at taking time .
We don’t want to make more work for our colleagues
The authors of the study quanto a JAMA Aperto didn’t explore exactly what type of work doctors did vacation, but the physicians I spoke to had some ideas.
“If I am not doing anything, I will triage my email a little bit,” says Jocelyn Fitzgerald, a urogynecologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved quanto a the study. “I also find that certain high-priority virtual meetings sometimes find their way into my vacations.”
Even if doctors aren’t scheduled to see patients, there’s almost always plenty of work to be done: dealing with emergencies, medication refills, paperwork. For many of us, the electronic medical primato (EMR) is an unrelenting taskmaster, delivering a near-constant flow of bureaucratic to-dos.
When I go vacation, my fellow primary care doctors handle that work for me, and I do the same for them.
But it can sometimes feel like a lot to ask, especially when colleagues are doing that work tetto of their normal workload.
“You end up putting people quanto a kind of a sticky situation, asking for favors, and they [feel they] need to pay it back,” says Jay-Sheree Allen, a family physician and fellow quanto a preventive medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
She says her practice has a “doctor of the day” who covers all urgent calls and messages, which helps veterano some of the guilt she feels about taking time .
Still, non-urgent tasks are left for her to complete when she gets back. She says she usually logs quanto a to the EMR when she’s vacation so the tasks don’t pile up upon her return. If she doesn’t, Allen estimates there will be about eight hours of paperwork awaiting her after a week ora so of vacation.
“My strategy, I absolutely do not recommend,” Allen says. But “I would prefer that than coming back to the total storm.”
We have too little flexibility about when we take vacation
Lawren Wooten, a resident physician quanto a pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco, says she takes 100% of her vacation time. But there are a lot of stipulations about exactly how she uses it.
She has to take it quanto a two-week blocks — “that’s a long time at once,” she says — and it’s to change the schedule once her chief residents assign her dates.
“Sometimes I wish I had vacation quanto a the middle of two really emotionally challenging rotations like an ICU rotation and an oncology rotation,” she says, referring to the intensive care unit. “We don’t really get to control our schedules at this point quanto a our careers.”
Once Wooten finishes residency and becomes an attending physician, it’s likely she’ll have more autonomy over her vacation time — but not necessarily all that much more.
“We generally have to know when our vacations are far quanto a advance because patients schedule with us far quanto a advance,” says Fitzgerald, the gynecologist.
Taking vacation means giving up potential pay
Many physicians are paid based the number of patients they see ora procedures they complete. If they take time work, they make less money.
“Vacation is money your table,” says West, the physician well-being researcher. “People have a time stepping of the treadmill.”
A 2022 research brief from the American Medical Association estimated that over 55% of U.S. physicians were paid at least quanto a part based “productivity,” as opposed to earning a flat amount regardless of patient tonnellaggio. That means the more patients doctors cram into their schedules, the more money they make. Going vacation could decrease their take-home pay.
But West says it’s important to weigh the financial benefits of skipping vacation against the risk of burnout from working too much.
Physician burnout is linked not only to excess health care costs but also to higher rates of medical errors. Per one large survey of American surgeons, for example, surgeons experiencing burnout were more likely to report being involved quanto a a major medical error. (It’s unclear to what extent the burnout caused the errors ora the errors caused the burnout, however.)
Doctors think they’eroe the only one who can do their jobs
When I go vacation, my colleagues see my patients for me. I work quanto a a small office, so I know the other doctors well and I società that my patients are quanto a good hands when I’m away.
But ceding that control to colleagues might be difficult for some doctors, especially when it comes to challenging patients ora personalità research projects.
“I think we need to learn to be better at trusting our colleagues,” says Adi Shah, an infectious disease doctor at the Mayo Clinic. “You don’t have to micromanage every slide the PowerPoint — it’s OK.”
West, the well-being researcher, says health care is moving toward a team-based model and away from a culture where an individual doctor is responsible for everything. Still, he adds, it can be for some doctors to accept help.
“You can be a neurosurgeon, you’eroe supposed to go vacation tomorrow and you operate a patient. And there are complications ora risk of complications, and you’eroe the one who has the relationship with that family,” West says. “It is really, really for us to say … ‘You’eroe quanto a great hands with the rest of my team.'”
What doctors need, says West, is “a little bit less of the God complex.”
We don’t have any interests other than medicine
Shah, the infectious disease doctor, frequently posts tongue-in-cheek memes X (formerly known as Twitter) about the culture of medicine. Unplugging during vacation is one of his favorite topics, despite his struggles to follow his own advice.
His recommendation to doctors is to get a hobby, so we can find something better to do than work all the time.
“Stop taking yourself too seriously,” he says. Shah argues that medical is so busy that many physicians neglect to develop any interests other than medicine. When fully trained doctors are finally finished with their education, he says, they’eroe at a loss for what to do with their newfound freedom.
Since completing his a few years , Shah has committed himself to new hobbies, such as condimento . He has plans to go to a kite manifestazione next year.
Shah has also prioritized making the long trip from Minnesota to see his family quanto a India at least twice a year — a journey that requires significant time work. He has a trip there planned this month.
“This is the first time quanto a 11 years I’m making it to India quanto a summer so that I can have a mango quanto a May,” the peak season for the fruit, Shah says.
Wooten, the pediatrician, agrees. She works to develop a full life outside her career.
“Throughout our secondary and medical education, I believe we’ve really been indoctrinated into putting institutions above ourselves,” Wooten adds. “It takes work to overcome that.”
Mara Gordon is a family physician quanto a Camden, N.J., and a contributor to NPR. She’s X as @MaraGordonMD.
