Survey details

For the report, Elsevier Health surveyed 2,212 medical and nursing students across 91 countries between April and May of this year. They found that, overall, 23% of students in the United States said they're considering quitting their studies, which includes 25% of medical students and 21% of nursing students. The survey also found that 16% of students plan to leave healthcare entirely.

According to the survey, 54% of students in the United States said they're concerned about their mental well-being suffering due to a clinical career. Additionally, 57% of US medical and nursing students anticipated suffering from clinician burnout, and 65% said they're worried about the impact clinician shortages will have on their career.

Meanwhile, the survey also found that 61% of students in the United States said they intend to work in roles that don't involve direct patient care, like public health, research, or business consulting.

Tate Erlinger, VP of clinical analytics at Elsevier, said the reasons students were considering leaving their studies were "variable."

"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," he said.

"I think there's a common sort of chronic feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of information that they need to obtain," Erlinger added.

Reaction

Jonathan Ripp, the dean for well-being and resilience and chief wellness officer at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said the survey's findings confirm past results and other studies that have found high levels of stress, burnout, and mental health concerns among medical students.

However, Ripp noted that medical education leaders have taken notice and that many schools are creating "well-being leaders" to help develop a culture that sets up students for success and makes them feel valued.

Gary Price, an attending surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital and president of the Physicians Foundation, said the survey results mirror what the Physicians Foundation found in its 2023 survey, which showed medical students have higher rates of burnout than physicians and residents.

However, Price noted he believes, "the report missed the boat as far as what to do about well-being."

"We aren't going to fix this problem by noting that canaries are dying in the coal mine and … sending out for tougher canaries," he said.

Candice Chen, from George Washington University's Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity, said students face a variety of "high stakes" pressures, including the financial burden of school, their first exposure to a clinical setting, and the current "dysfunction" within those settings.

"A really, really key part of training medical students and nursing students is the immersion that they have in clinical settings and the real-life experience … that they get in those settings," Chen said.

"As long as those ... clinical settings are dysfunctional and the workers themselves are working in environments that are driving burnout and driving moral injury, medical and nursing students are going to start feeling it," she added.

Geoffrey Young, senior director of Transforming the Health Care Workforce at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) noted that while many students may have second thoughts about medical school, "these feelings don't generally translate into action."

Young said that data from a recent AAMC report showed "that medical school graduation rates for non-dual degree MD students remained stable from academic year 1998-1999 through academic year 2017-2018."

"Six years after matriculation, the average graduation rate was 96% of non-dual degree MD students," he added.

Young also noted that, between 2019 and 2023, just 8% to 10% of second-year medical students and graduates who responded to an AAMC national survey said they wouldn't or probably wouldn't consider attending medical school again, if given the choice.

"Over 85% would probably or definitely attend again, while roughly 5% to 10% responded with 'neutral,'" Young said. (Sudhakar, Fox News, 11/6; Firth, MedPage Today, 11/2; Choi, The Hill, 10/30)

Healthcare's workforce crisis is a top concern for executives, and it's not going away anytime soon. The Radio Advisory podcast team put together insights from five episodes that delve into the short- and long-term challenges the industry faces — and ways leaders can respond.