Most people want stability in their lives. Physicians are no different.
We want stability with our jobs.
We don’t want to move every four or five years, while dragging our kids out of one school and into the next.
It’s not fair to our significant others and our families.
Unfortunately, physician jobs are not anywhere near stable these days.
The times of a doc being at a practice for decades are long gone.
Most docs that had that kind of stability worked at private practices where they could control things.
Small private practices aren’t profitable anymore, and even large ones are having a hard time.
This leads to takeovers by hospital systems or private equity.
They both only care about money and introduce tremendous instability to job longevity.
Add in the non-competes and you get a real recipe for job instability.
Not only may the job not be stable due to the factors mentioned above, but now you aren’t even allowed to go across town and get a job somewhere else.
This means that when things don’t work out, you will be forced to move again.
This process will likely accelerate until docs are only staying at a job for 2-4 years. Enough to collect the initial guaranteed contract, and then suffer a bit through the contract “renewal”.
Those that have direct care practices that are based only on cash payments will have paradoxically stable jobs.
They may seem less stable because the volume is a lot lower and they take time to build. But they aren’t subject to the vagaries of hospital and private equity takeovers.
