Health Ticket

Despite the fact that we go to school for years, take endless continuing education courses to stay current in our specialty, and just generally never stop studying medicine, physicians like me are often as stupid as anyone else when it comes to career choices – like where and for whom we should work.

For too often we approach finding a job just like anyone else – by going online or asking our friends who are also physicians if they are “happy” where they’re working. I’m not saying this is absolutely the wrong approach; in fact, it’s probably a good start. But physicians who continue to manage their own job search to the point of signing on the dotted line are akin to a patient who researches heart surgery on the internet, talks to some friends who have gone through it, then proceeds to operate on himself!

Recently, I needed to make a quick job change for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. Just like the patient in the example above, I thought I would just check out a few physician job boards, make a few phone calls to set up interviews and – voila! – land the ideal permanent position.  Well, after a few very frustrating weeks I realized I needed to call in a specialist, specifically a physician recruiter who had experience in my specialty. The specific recruiter I spoke to said I stood a better chance of landing a job more quickly if I agreed to a locum tenens emergency medicine job – a temporary position that would get me out of my current position as rapidly as I wanted.

I took his advice and was out of the old ER and in the new one in a matter of a few weeks.  I just wished I had called in this career specialist sooner.