Tough question, and there are many layers of problems with a health care system which makes in unappealing.
I've seen a transition where the focus on care has shifted to quantity rather than quality. Hospital administrators want rooms turned over as quickly as possible. Even our department gets comments from a VP that about if we move 100 patients the day before, lets make it 110 today. This might reduce wait times in the lobby, but it makes it easier to miss important things when you are rushed treating someone.
What do we do about low reimbursement rates preventing the funds to keep rural hospitals open, let alone pay staff and repair or replace equipment? Reimbursement rates being tied to readmissions and satisfaction score is making things even worse. Why enter a field or move to an area where you worry about the doors getting locked or always working with aging or broken equipment?
NTP2 mentioned the mental health. I think people can either handle it or not. Everyone deals with tragedy and grief differently and it is a hard skill to teach. I don't know how medical schools are, but EMS classes do okay preparing people to handle grief and trauma, the schools don't do as well talking about other stresses of the job not directly related to patient care.
Get rid of computers period! Major reason I retired at age 64. Turning M.D.'s into keypunch artists is the biggest waste of their time! I dictated my paper medical records based on my hand written crib notes so anyone could read my paper medical records clearly. I could page through my records and see clearly what I did to a patient in the past. Saved me a lot of time. Sure beat "scroll click, scroll click, scroll click" chit.
If I was filling in for another M.D. that didn't dictate and their hand writing was illegible, it was a "beech" to figure out what the heck the doc was doing.
Asked the head hospital administrator if he minded if I dictated all my hospital notes in the hospital system when I went to work at the local clinic I stayed at for my entire career. H&P's and discharge summaries were expected to be dictated. He said it was fine to do all my notes dictated. They would appear on the paper charts the next day and I'd sign off on them before "everything" became computerized.
When computers came online, records now occupy most of a primary care M.D.'s time and make primary care so dissatisfying. Was so glad I was able to
retire and get out when I did. I have no regrets. The student docs coming out now are too stupid to realize how good it was years ago.
Computers for lab work I have a different opinion of. Was happy with that as I could access lab work hot off the press and didn't have to wait for the "hard copy".
Oh, I had many a phone call from an itinerant E.R. doc for a patient admit of mine and received many compliments from the doc as they were reviewing the
patients' past medical records and they could "READ" everything I did in the past in the old records.
I DO NOT recommend to any young person to go into medicine anymore. It's a waste of time. It was so much more efficient in the days of old with dictated paper records. It's nearly impossible to do office work, hospital work and take call in primary care anymore due to the current system.
If one is in an "office only" practice with income based on production only, it's impossible to produce enough if one has a bunch of elderly complex patients to see. They take more time and hence production is down. Plus if one isn't involved with the care of a patient in the hospital, they are clueless once they're
discharged. Can follow with the specialists if they're needed and be familiar with what is going on with the patient before discharge.
Nowadays in the next big city over, primary care docs aren't allowed to see patients in the hospital anymore. That has been going on for
years now. There are "hospitalists" who never see the patient outside of the hospital and are "clueless" as to what is going on. Continuity of care
has "gone to hell".
I recommend to go into another field. O.k. some specialties are better than others but that would take another long post to go into. Kurt (used to M.D. for a living now retired)