Considering the substantial amount of time, effort, money and commitment involved in medical training, it’s natural—and perhaps even prudent—to think about the kind of return on investment you can expect after getting your medical license. 

If your personal scale of success leans toward physician quality of life, then asking now about how your time might be spent is a good way to map your path for moving forward. If it’s a matter of time spent in the office, let’s consider what doctors work the least hours? For those who hate rigidity, we’ll explore what doctors have the most flexible hours,and for others driven by the freedom to spend time with family and friends, we’ll dive into which doctor gets the most free time. Lastly, if your ideal is measured by leaving it all behind while you’re on vacation, we’ll investigate what are the best specialties in medicine for worklife balance.

What doctors work the least hours?

According to a survey by the AMA, only 13% of doctors aged 40-69 work fewer than 40 hours per week. Among those lucky few are pain physicians, geriatricians and podiatrists. Most doctors, however, work 40-60 hours per week. Among them, according to a survey by Medscape, allergists and immunologists work the least number of hours at 44.1 hours per week, followed closely by dermatologists, emergency medicine doctors and psychiatrists.

Factors keeping specialists at the lowest end of the spectrum include practice setting and the level of patient care. Those with the least hours often work in a private practice or have non-urgent patients in ambulatory settings. Psychiatrists are different because they are increasingly trending toward telehealth. While emergency medicine doctors work in the hospital and their hours can be all over the place (days, nights, weekends), the nature of their schedules doesn’t call for long hours at a time. 

If you’re interested in a field that averages longer hours per week, there are time management skills you can work on: spending time charting, building up a reliable support staff and adjusting your style of working, such as talking to patients and their families.

What doctors have the most flexible hours?

Whether you work 44 hours or 58, it’s a lot easier to deal with if you know there is some flexibility to move your schedule around when something arises. Even so, some fields have intrinsic barriers against flexibility like acute settings that require intensive monitoring. Other fields have formal or informal workarounds that enable physicians to manipulate their schedules. 

Among doctors working more than 40 hours per week, dermatologists, allergists, family medicine doctors, psychiatrists, pathologists, otolaryngologists and ophthalmologists tend to have more flexibility.

Malleable schedules are more common with specialties that typically work out of private clinics, giving them better control over how many patients they see and when.

Psychiatrists often have shorter work weeks than other specialties and can take their practice fully virtual, allowing them the most flexibility of any specialty. 

Which doctors get the most free time

Generally, physicians in VA clinics work 9-5, with the rest of their evenings and most weekends free. Other specialists with regular free time include preventive medicine/occupational health specialists, cosmetic surgeons, dermatologists, pathologists (with the exception of forensic pathologists) and anesthesiologists in an ambulatory surgery center. 

Surprisingly, doctors who work the most hours also have a lot of free time. Surgeons, cardiologists and a few other physicians that work an average of 60 hours a week or more have salaries upwards of $400,000 a year. Their higher salaries shield them, to some degree, from the burdens of financial stress. On the other hand, physicians whose average compensation is around $250,000 or less have reported the growing need to take on side gigs to supplement their income. 

In online forums, hospitalists, nocturnists and intensivists boast having some of the most free time. Even though most hospitalists work 84 hours a week doing 12-hour shifts for seven days straight, they have the next seven days off. It’s grueling, but many insist it’s worth it.

If you want periods of extended free time but are more interested in fields that average long hours, you might consider locum tenens. With locum tenens, you won’t get sign on bonuses, health insurance or a 401(k) plan, but most locum tenens make extremely good salaries and can refuse a new assignment for as long as they wish.

What are the best specialties in medicine for worklife balance

Work hard, play hard, or so the saying goes. One of the best indicators of physician worklife balance is how long you can get away. On that note, 59.6% of doctors in a recent survey reported taking 15 days or less of vacation per year—which is on par with the average working American. The difference is over 70% of doctors said they work while on vacation. Some tasks they reported doing were responding to emails, logging into virtual meetings, medication refills and unfinished paperwork.

Some of this can be contributed to workaholism, but more times than not, physicians work during vacations because they couldn’t find coverage of the patient workload, financial concerns or fear of returning to work with a backlog of EHR messages.

Ultimately, for the best physician worklife balance, the specialty itself isn’t the determining factor. It’s how well you negotiate your contract and manage your time. To avoid succumbing to working while on vacation, it’s never too late to develop effective ways to deal with those issues such as planning ahead, setting boundaries, signing out of work accounts and nurturing relationships with colleagues so they’ll be more willing to step in when you need them.

To ensure the kind of physician quality of life that will allow you to thrive and not get burned out, you have to negotiate time off during the recruitment process and get it in your contract. Negotiating time off is similar to negotiating other benefits, like pay or sign-on bonuses, although you may need to make compromises, such as less pay, in order to come to an agreement.

To find the best career fit for you, including positions that prioritize work-life balance, visit the PracticeLink.com physician job board.

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