Creating the Best Year of Your Life with Your Family - A Wellness Plan to Replenish Your Passion for Medicine and Change Your Life

What would you give up to create the best year of your life? Would you take a leave of absence from work, more than a 50% pay cut, and move halfway around the world? That is exactly what I did and it was the best decision I have ever made for myself or my family. In the next 60 minutes I will convince you to consider a similar adventure in the middle of your career.

My personal plan for wellness started with the concept of a ‘pause’ in my academic Emergency Medicine career roughly 15 years after residency. However, I also knew that I wanted to create a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity with my wife and children before my children entered high school. The final result was the opportunity to work part-time in Emergency Medicine in New Zealand and explore a National Healthcare system. While I had the luxury of having more time to spend with my family, I also had enough shifts to appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of a National Healthcare system and use that as a lens for comparison with our healthcare system. Most poignantly, I benefited from the concerted and holistic effort to embrace biculturalism in a country that is actively seeking to address the numerous social disparities of health created by the British Colonial rule imposed on the indigenous Māori population. My children also benefited from the integration of Māori culture and language into all educational curricula with their immersion into the Kiwi school system, and they could not have received a more valuable education.

I will challenge your current concept of a ‘normal’ professional career trajectory, and inspire you to contemplate using the flexible Emergency Medicine profession to change your life for the better as I have done for mine.