Before You Quit Medicine, Watch This

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This video is about a question I think a huge number of doctors are quietly sitting with right now: should I leave medicine?

This is a question I've considered myself, more than once.

During GP training, I spent rotation after rotation in posts that felt disconnected from the kind of doctor I wanted to be. There was no dramatic breaking point, just a slow, quiet disengagement I kept pushing through, telling myself it would pass once I finally qualified.

What changed things was realising I couldn't keep yearning for the destination while not enjoying the journey. I needed to balance my clinical practice with something that scratched a different part of my brain.

I made a decision that felt small at the time: reaching out to clinicians who had broken into healthtech on LinkedIn. After a number of conversations, I decided to drop to less than full time to take up a healthtech fellowship. That one move changed the course of my career, and is probably the reason I'm still practising clinical medicine today.

The conclusion I came to, after nearly leaving and then finding a middle path, is that the question itself is usually the wrong starting point. "Should I stay or go?" is too binary. The better question is: "What do I actually want from my career, and what trade-offs am I prepared to make?"

I also noticed that there was no single resource that brought the frameworks together in one place. People offered anecdotes, but not strategies for working through the decision and reaching your own conclusion. That's what I wanted this video to provide.

As always, if you found this useful, the best way to stay connected is to subscribe. I'll email you when a new video goes up, with the notes and thoughts that didn't make it on camera.

Until next time,

Katherine

💭 What didn't make it on camera

1. For some doctors, leaving isn’t a choice, it’s being made for them.
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   The video is framed around the question of whether to leave. But for a growing number of UK doctors, that question has already been answered by the system. The training pipeline has produced far more qualified doctors than there are posts; in 2025, there were over 90,000 applications for fewer than 13,000 specialty training places, and GP unemployment is rising. Though that’s a structural, not a personal problem, the question of what to do next is the same whether you’re being pushed or pulled, and hopefully the frameworks in this video will be useful either way.
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2. Two podcasts worth your time:​
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   Beyond my own network of friends and colleagues, two podcasts in particular have been very insightful in terms of how I think about "alternative" clinical careers:
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   ​Out of Programme - hosted by Dr Jing Ouyang. Conversations with doctors who’ve stepped off the beaten track, reflecting on their careers, driving motivations, and pivotal moments. The guests have such a wide variety of different journeys. Every episode I learn something new, whether it's a career route I hadn't considered or a new way of thinking about a difficult decision.
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   ​The Healthtech Podcast - hosted by Dr James Somauroo. A treasure trove of healthtech goodness. Though it's primarily focused on the people and ideas shaping healthtech, many episodes feature clinicians who've pivoted out of pure clinical medicine. A good place to start is this miniseries hosted by Dr Keith Grimes, diving specifically into how a number of clinicians broke into this space.
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3. A podcast episode that inspired me. Whilst researching this video, I listened to James (host of The Healthtech Podcast) being interviewed on the Out of Programme podcast - video below. Two points stood out to me in particular:
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   Optimising for optionality, not certainty. When James was reflecting on how he decided to take on a role at an accelerator versus a role in a specific startup, he used an analogy of "selling the shovels rather than digging for gold". This allowed him to be in a high-learning, lower-risk position rather than going all-in on a single company or role.​
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   Running toward something beats running away from something. He warns against taking "any port in a storm" just to escape a bad job, because you might end up hating the new corporate gig just as much. Echoing the emphasis on reflective work in this video, his advice is to do the identity work first: audit your actual interests and transferable skills, find the sub-sectors that genuinely pull you, and build a specific narrative for where you want to go - rather than just running from where you are.
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🔍 Sources behind the video

The frameworks

Tim Urban (2018) — How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You). Wait But Why. 🔗 waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html The original home of the Yearning Octopus. Long, but worth every minute. This is the blog post I made a whole specialty-choice video about back in 2021, and still the framework I return to most.

Ines Lee — Sideroad 38. 🔗 Job vs CallingThe piece that directly inspired Framework 2 in this video. My cousin Ines writes on careers, work, and meaning: A place for high-achievers who sense the main highway no longer leads where they want to go. Well worth checking out!

Suzy Welch — Becoming You with Suzy Welch podcast. 🔗 Listen on Spotify The birthday question framework features in the episode "The Danger of a B+ Life" (18 March 2025) — note that Suzy uses 85th birthday in this episode rather than 75th, but the principle is the same.

The research on regret

Bronnie Ware (2011/2012) — The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. Hay House. 🔗 bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying Originally a 2009 blog post read by millions, later a book translated into more than 30 languages. Ware spent years in palliative care; the regret she heard most was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me," followed closely by "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

The statistics

British Medical Association (BMA) — A third of doctors consider leaving UK. 🔗 bma.org.uk The source behind the headline statistic in this video's hook.