The growing stress of medical school is beginning to take its toll on students training to become physicians, as a new report has found that 1 in 4 in the U.S. consider quitting before finishing their training.
The “Clinician of the Future: Education Edition” report was released by the health science and journal publisher Elsevier. The survey included responses from 2,212 students from 91 countries between April and May of this year.
Students in the U.S. who contributed to the report said they have concerns about their mental health (60%), their income (69%), experiencing burnout (63%), and how clinician shortages will affect them once they leave school (60%).
Around the globe, the report found that 12% of medical students consider quitting before they become fully trained, while among students in the U.S., that number doubles to 25%.
“Students are committed to and positive about their education, but with concerns about mental health study-life balance, combined with external worries such as the rise of misinformation and looming clinician shortages, some are considering quitting their course altogether, while others are thinking about non- patient-facing roles once qualified,” the report stated.
The report also found that 58% of medical and nursing students said they found their current studies as a stepping stone to careers that don’t involve treating patients in the healthcare field.
Tate Erlinger is the vice president of clinical analytics at Elsevier, and he shared in a statement that there was no one reason why students considered leaving.
“There were several things [that] sort of floated to the top at least that caught my attention. One was sort of the cost, and that’s not limited to the U.S., but the U.S. students are more likely to be worried about the cost of their studies,” Erlinger said.
He continued by saying there seems to be a “chronic feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of information that they need to obtain.”