resident drop out rate

[ellorie]

I’m not aware of anybody in my cohort or in my program in my time who left medicine entirely. We typically had a transfer (usually to family medicine) every couple years or so. I’m aware of 2 between my cohort and the cohorts below me in my 5 years but I wasn’t paying much attention to know the details. My program was very big (like 36 residents per year) so not a high percent compared to others. In psych it’s usually that people find they miss the general medicine aspect, though some of these stay in and do geri psych or CL or neuropsych or neurostim stuff.  And of course the usual maternity/medical leaves but those people came back eventually.  I think maybe one didn’t but I’m not sure what happened there. 
 

I think it’s just so hard as a medical student to really know what you’re getting into and what you’ll like on a day to day basis when you never stay anywhere longer than a few weeks.  There were definitely highly stressful aspects of my specialty I didn’t anticipate. 

Still, I would have been beyond frustrated having to do another general year when I really hated most of medicine. Plus can you imagine two sets of CaRMS? One is bad enough. And with the increasing specialization/subspecialization it’s hard to imagine where a true GP without FM certification would really fit into our system.