The story we tell about doctors who leave. What if burnout Isn’t the whole picture?
There's a common assumption whenever a doctor steps away from clinical medicine: that they must have burned out. It's the explanation people reach for first, rather than asking whether it's actually true. I understand why. It's the story we hear most, and it fits with the current narrative that everyone is leaving.
It's also, I've noticed, the angle people are often keenest to pursue when I've been approached to share my story — journalists, podcast hosts, people writing about doctors leaving medicine. Burnout makes for a more clickable headline than "I found something I wanted to do more." I understand why it's the angle others want. I'm just not willing to force my story into that mould, just because it's the one that gets more attention.
Because that's not my story.
Like any profession, medicine is incredibly hard at times — and yes, there were plenty of periods where I struggled: juggling so much, workplace culture and pressures, the degree of stress that comes with constantly making decisions, the sometimes overwhelming sense of responsibility. But there was also so much to celebrate — incredible camaraderie, a deep sense of purpose, moments of genuine joy and laughter and the rare honour of being a part of patients' lives and trusted with so much, the insight and perspective that gave me on humanity. When I look back, with the benefit of hindsight I think there were periods where I was close to burnout, if not burnt out. I'm not sure I recognised it at the time, and I know that very often I didn’t have the support I needed. That’s important to recognise, but it’s not the overwhelming memory I have of my 20 years as a doctor, nor is it the reason I left the NHS. There's so much more to it than that, and I'd hate for the truth to get clouded under a blanket of someone else's assumption.
None of the experiences, the conversations, the insights, the joy, the connection, or the sense of purpose I found in medicine gets erased just because I left. Medicine gave my life meaning and direction I'm still deeply grateful for, and it's a career I wouldn't change for anything. It took many years to get there, a winding path through dental school, maxillofacial surgery, medical school, GP training, gaining experience in many roles and organisations. It's a huge chapter of my life that has left its mark on me in so many ways. And yet leaving can be treated by some in the profession as if it erases everything that came before it — as though the years stop counting the moment you go. I won't let that happen.
It's important not to assume that everyone who has
left clinical medicine
did so because they burned out…
In 2018, I didn't leave because I was at a point of breaking. I left because it felt like the right time to do so.
It started with coaching. During my time as a GP partner, I had the chance to be coached myself, and it was genuinely transformational — not just for the pressures of the job, but for how I understood myself within it. That experience led me a few years on to train as a coach through the Yorkshire Deanery. Like most training that asks you to work on yourself as much as on a skill, I came away having learned as much about who I was as about how to coach others.
At first, I brought coaching back into the role I already had, working as a clinical lead GP managing a large team. But the more I did it, the more I wanted to give it space to grow properly, rather than fitting it around everything else. So I stepped away from general practice for six months, fully intending to go back.
That isn't what happened. Through my own coaching journey, and through coaching other doctors, I started to notice where I actually felt most useful and most myself. With a lifetime of experience in clinical practice behind me, the right place for me, at that point in my career, felt like it was supporting others within the profession.
I had a sense that, as a coach, I could do so much good — that I could help the people within this profession, people like me, who needed it most. After decades of working in the NHS, I knew this was what I wanted to do: to support others in gaining perspective, to feel grounded, to connect back to themselves, to nature, and to each other, and ultimately to flourish. That's why I created Earth and Bloom and why I moved on from clinical practice and it wasn’t because I'd been pushed out, rather I'd planted some carefully harvested seeds that I wanted to tend and watch grow.
Earth and Bloom isn't only for people who have burnt out or who are thinking about leaving, although of course, coaching and community are so valuable at those times. It's also for the vast majority of people like me — doctors and healthcare professionals finding things testing: juggling career and family, wrestling with imposter syndrome, working within challenging conditions and dynamics, questioning their sense of purpose. It's for anyone who wants to move towards a place where they can flourish — to find a path that feels like them again, one that reflects their values and their purpose.
That's at the heart of why I made that choice, and in the eight years since, nothing about it has changed, except that my vision has become clearer, and I believe in it even more.
But what I see, day after day, is this same assumption: that if we leave, it must be because we've burned out. The opposite can just as easily be true. We leave, or we move towards something different, because we know what we want — because we're reaching for work that will nourish us, whether that's a different path within medicine or leaving medicine altogether.
I want to be clear about something here, because this isn't about minimising burnout. Burnout in medicine is real, and it's often devastating. I've sat with doctors who were suffering, and I have huge compassion for anyone in that place. Nothing in this piece is meant to dismiss that experience or suggest it's any less serious than it is. It's simply that burnout isn't the only reason people leave, and treating it as if it were does a disservice both to people whose story is different, and to people who genuinely are burning out and deserve more thoughtful support than a single explanation offers.
I think this assumption does more damage than people intend. It misrepresents doctors like me who left for positive reasons. But it also narrows the options for doctors who genuinely are struggling, by making leaving look like the only legitimate way forward when things get hard — as though you need to have reached crisis point before any change is justified.
There's a wider cost to this too. When every departure gets filed under "burnout," it becomes a convenient story for the systems doctors work within. It locates the problem entirely in the individual who "couldn't cope," rather than in working conditions that need to change, or in the simple fact that doctors are allowed to have ambitions beyond clinical practice. That's a much easier story for a system to tell than looking honestly at what it's asking of the people inside it.
Through coaching hundreds of doctors over the years, many of whom arrived wanting to leave medicine altogether, I've observed that most of them stay. This isn’t by grinding through or accepting things as they are, but by finding a way of working and living that's actually true to them. Leaving is one option. It is never the only one, and it shouldn't be treated as the default sign that things have got bad enough to act on.
There's often an assumption that if you're no longer in the profession, you can't really understand what's going on inside it. I understand where that comes from — I'm not doing the job day to day anymore. But I work almost every day with doctors who are, and I bring decades of my own experience in the NHS to that work. There's real value in speaking with someone who has that perspective: someone who has left clinical work, but stayed closely connected to what's actually happening inside medicine.
It was only once I'd left that I began to see the fuller picture — the challenges, the joys, the sense of purpose, all of it — with a clarity I didn't have while I was still inside it. I think that's partly the benefit of age and experience. But it's also something I see in coaching all the time: moving from a narrow, introspective view to a wider, far reaching one can do so much to help someone move forward. When I'm coaching a doctor, there's often a point where that wider landscape opens up ahead of them either literally or metaphorically, rather than just the next shift or the next difficult decision — and it's in that opening up that people really start to understand what they need, and what's actually going on for them.
One of my hopes for the work I do at Earth and Bloom is that it doesn't take leaving the profession to see that fuller picture. It's a bit like walking up to a viewpoint and finally seeing the landscape stretched out ahead of you — the peaks, the troughs, the beautiful bits in between, all at once, instead of just the small patch of ground right in front of your feet. That's what I hope coaching can offer people who are still practising: that same view, without feeling like they have to leave first.
If you've left clinical practice, or stayed and found your own way through, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Was it burnout, was it something you moved towards, or both? There isn't one right story here, and I think we need more of the real ones told.