“Before retirement, I switched everything I cared about to my personal one and unsubscribed to everything I didn’t care about. For the first few months, I religiously checked my work email. Sure, I was missing important information. I finally weaned myself like a reluctant nursing baby.

On the rare occasions I check my work email, it has spam, irrelevant ads, missives from my previous employer about meetings or new incentive plans I care nothing about.

In contrast, my personal email has lunch invitations from friends and interesting articles from Smithsonian, National Geographic, Atlas Obscura, and NY Times.

Don’t get me wrong. I still read the frequent emails from the pediatric hospitalist listserv, a very busy means of communication for the nation’s pediatric hospitalists. It helps me stay up to date on new therapies and new issues in pediatrics. But most of my emails now evoke pleasure, not duty.”

Ann F. Beach is a pediatric hospitalist.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “A physician’s personal great resignation.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/follow. Today on the show, we have Ann Beach. She’s a pediatric hospitalist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “A physician’s personal great resignation.” And welcome to the show.

Ann F. Beach: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you just share your story and journey to where you are today?

Ann F. Beach: So I went to medical school and did my pediatric residency at Bowman Gray, which is now Wake Forest, in North Carolina. After that, I was a small-town pediatrician in Georgia. I was there for a few years, then moved to Atlanta as a pediatrician in the suburbs and ended up working for Kaiser Permanente.

Along the way, I had a variety of jobs. I, of course, was initially a regular pediatrician in an office, seeing my own panel of patients. I became an expert in child abuse and spent some time testifying in court as an expert witness and in child abuse clinic. I got interested in quality of care and utilization and ended up being a hospital administrator for several years, both at Kaiser and at Children’s Hospital. And I ended up, for the last 20 years, in my first love, hospital pediatrics, taking care of children inpatient, in the inpatient world.

Kevin Pho: Now, as you reflect back on your experiences, what would you say are some of the rewards and challenges of pediatrics?

Ann F. Beach: So the rewards are, children are the best people in the world to hang around with every day. If I was going to spend my day hanging around with somebody, it would certainly be kids. The rewards of office pediatrics are that you get to see children grow up, you get to help families through hard times, you get to see brand-new parents become accomplished parents, and you build a relationship with them.

The rewards of being in the hospital, for me, were that I found it incredibly intellectually challenging. I learned something new every day. I practiced in a big-city hospital, so we saw a combination of garden-variety pediatrics, pneumonia, dehydration, and asthma, but we also saw diagnostic dilemmas, unusual presentations, and rare illnesses. So it was something new every day.

Kevin Pho: And tell me, what are some of the challenges facing pediatricians today?

Ann F. Beach: COVID has been very difficult for pediatricians. Of course, during the first year of COVID, children were not sick much, because they weren’t in school, they weren’t in daycare, they weren’t in their germ pits to share germs. And so pediatricians found that their volume dropped. Parents were afraid to come in for well visits, so vaccination levels dropped. So I think there have been a lot of financial challenges for most pediatricians in the last couple of years.

Kevin Pho: All right, and let’s transition into the KevinMD article that you wrote. This was back in April. It’s titled “A physician’s personal great resignation.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Ann F. Beach: So the article is 12 thoughts about my first 12 months of retirement. The reason I wrote it is that my old partners kept saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to come back? Aren’t you bored at home? Don’t you miss us? Surely you want to come back and even work part time.” So I started thinking about why it is that I love pediatrics and love being a hospitalist, and why it is that I don’t miss it enough to go back. So that self-examination led to me writing the article. This is a matter of self-reflection.

Kevin Pho: So tell me some of those 12 thoughts that prevent you from going back.

Ann F. Beach: I’ve finally gotten rid of my sleep deficit. I’m pretty sure I’ve had a sleep deficit since medical school, and I bet every doctor feels that way. For the last year, I’ve slept about eight or nine hours every night without an alarm clock to wake me up, and that’s been pretty heavenly, and I feel great.

I also am thrilled to find out that I really like spending time with my husband. We’ve both had busy careers. We’ve both spent most of the last years away from each other during the workday, and the time that we had together was the busy time: “You pick up the kid at soccer. I’ll go to the grocery store. Let’s fall into bed before we have to get up tomorrow morning.” And now we get the best time of each other, and he’s very cool. So I’m very happy to find out what a good time we’re having together.

I feel like we saved ferociously for retirement, and I often had long call nights when I was miserable and I was going to the ER to do yet another admission. And I would say to myself, “This money that I’m earning tonight, this is retirement money. I’m going to love spending this money in a few years.” And so over the last year, we’ve had a couple of wonderful trips, and I have been able to say to myself, “I am spending that money, that money that I worked so hard for,” and it’s great. I’m having a blast.

I have the time to work on getting fit. I’ve had a bunch of surgery in the last few years that I needed to recover from. I’ve hired a personal trainer, and she’s slowly but surely whipping me into shape, and I feel better than I have in years. Those are a few of my 12 reasons.

Kevin Pho: How difficult was it for you to leave clinical medicine? You mentioned you’ve been doing this for 40 years, and now you’re in your retirement life. How difficult was that transition for you?

Ann F. Beach: I always thought of myself as a one-trick pony, but there’s one thing I always wanted to do, and that was be a doctor, and I got to do it. So I was a little bit worried that I would be bored or not have other interests, and I was very, very wrong, because I really have a lot of other interests. I write, I’m a voracious reader, we travel, and I have a wide circle of friends. I’ve found a ton to do.

So part of not missing the intellectual challenge of working is that the writing that I do is medically based. I’ve just finished a book whose working title is Solving Pediatric Medical Mysteries, and it’s a series of true stories about children who were admitted to the hospital with one diagnosis but went home with another. I’m fascinated by the challenges of diagnosing. It’s an art, it’s a science, and there are pitfalls along the way. It is challenging in so many dimensions. And so I’m fascinated by cognitive errors, by how hard it is to improve the process of diagnosis. And so this book is a way to tell those stories, the cautionary tales, the leaps of thought that lead to a good diagnosis.

I’m also very interested in medical history, and I do a lot of writing about the history of medicine. So even though I’m not at work seeing patients and getting a paycheck for doing that, I’m still thinking about medicine and reading about medicine and figuring out things about medicine. So I think that’s what keeps me feeling fulfilled.

Kevin Pho: In general, do you think that physicians have to wait until retirement to enjoy all of the things that you just described? Is it an either-or proposition? Can physicians enjoy some of the things that you described while they’re still practicing?

Ann F. Beach: Well, I think it’s crucial. You know, my father used to say, I remember when I was first looking for jobs, he said, “If you don’t like going to work every day, they can’t pay you enough.” And it was his way of saying, “Don’t be seduced by the package that’s offered. Think about what you’re going to be doing every day, and if you like what you’re doing every day, you’re fine.”

And I have, during my career, done all kinds of different things, and most of those things have been serendipitous, but I have liked going to work almost every day of 40 years, which is what I think everybody needs to seek. Within the field of pediatrics, within the field of medicine, there are so many ways to have a career, and you’re a good example of that. You know, your career is not a standard physician career, and my career has been all over the map. When I first started as an office pediatrician, there was no such thing as hospitalists, so I couldn’t have foreseen that I would end up doing that.

So I think within the field of medicine, there are so many ways that we can find satisfaction that there’s no reason to be stuck in a job that you hate and feel like you just have to slog along to retirement. I think you can have fun, and you have to have fun along the way.

Kevin Pho: So I want to explore this a little bit more, because I talk to a lot of physicians, and I’m sure you know a lot of physicians who are, quote, unquote, stuck in their jobs. If you look at the burnout rate, I think I read an article in which it was 50 percent before the pandemic and 70 percent now. And a lot of physicians, you go to Facebook groups, and they complain about their jobs. They feel like they’re stuck in what they’re doing, and they clearly don’t enjoy what they’re doing. So what kind of advice do you have for these physicians who may be stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy going to? How do you advise them to break away from that?

Ann F. Beach: Well, we’re living in a really unusual time, an unprecedented time. And so, you know, people who are burned out because they’re trying to save people who are dying of COVID, and they’re understaffed and overworked, that’s such a special situation. Maybe I’ll set that aside, because that’s so different and so hard, and I hope we’re through the worst of that.

But for everybody else, I think the message is, you have a ton of options. You don’t have to do this thing that you’re doing every day. And yes, maybe you’ve got big loans you’ve got to pay off, and you’ve got kids, and you’ve got a mortgage, and you have a financial imperative, but think outside the box and look around, because we’re very marketable. There are a lot of ways for us to make money. It just kills your soul to hate to go to work every day. It’s not worth it. I just think you have to be open to opportunities.

Kevin Pho: All right. We’re talking to Ann Beach. She’s a pediatric hospitalist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “A physician’s personal great resignation.” And as you reflect back on your career, and now I’m so happy to hear that you’re enjoying retirement, what would you say is something that you know now, after practicing for 40 years, that you wish you knew back when you started?

Ann F. Beach: Well, if I look back to the brand-new me, the doctor 40 years ago, I wish I knew that the decisions I made then weren’t permanent: that my practice could change, my life situation could change, that the decisions that I made then, like what practice to join and what town to live in, those weren’t permanent. Those things were all going to change, and I could look forward to having a really multifaceted career.

I also wish I had realized that I didn’t have to know everything, and that you could always phone a friend. You know, medicine needs to be collegial. I don’t have to know everything. I need to know how to look up stuff. I need to know who to talk to. I need other brains to rub up against, but I personally don’t have to know every single thing. And that took me a long time to learn.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Ann F. Beach: Have fun at work. I think that’s the most important thing. Love what you do, and figure out a way to have that job that you love.

I guess my other take-home message is that I was startled to realize that those 12 months had flown, back when I sat down to write this article and to think about what things I had learned in the last year. It was one of the fastest years of my life. So I feel like life flies by fast. So honestly, all those things you want to do, figure out how to start to do them. Don’t wait for retirement.

Kevin Pho: Ann, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Ann F. Beach: Thanks. It was delightful to be with you.