Part-time doctors, full-time patients

Gradually, the guilt subsided. I accrued a practice made up of patients who knew my schedule and accepted it. I trusted the doctors with whom I shared coverage. The development of encrypted electronic records allowed me to look up patients’ medical information and call them from home when necessary. It wasn’t perfect - at home or at the office - but I counted myself lucky to be able to forgo some income to have more time for Little League, Play-Doh, and even occasional solitude, as many working parents would if they could.

Having made peace with my decision to work part time when my kids were small, I was surprised at the depth of my alarm as I read a recent op-ed article in The New York Times in which Karen S. Sibert, a mother of four who works full time as an anesthesiologist, asserts that women physicians who work part time are betraying their patients, their full-time colleagues, and the taxpayers who partially subsidized their medical education.

Sibert points to the projected growing shortage of physicians in an aging America - a deficit of up to 150,000 in the next 15 years, by one estimate - as a reason why women who receive medical degrees should commit to full-time work. She notes that since women are more likely than men to enter primary care fields such as internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology, in which the shortage of physicians is greatest, and are more likely to work in underserved communities, the loss of work hours when female physicians cut back is most sorely felt.