To change careers and become a doctor at 39?

[ValleyOfTheTramadols]

Just that really. I have a degree and a masters in humanities and history respectively but have always been interested in science and medicine as well. My masters specialised in medical history. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital with my son recently and I have developed a strong urge/feeling/calling to retrain in medicine. I would have to sit A levels in two science subjects before applying to a medical course but I could do that in a year. Then with the six year medical degree and first foundation year I could be a ‘full’ doctor by the age of 47. Nearly 20 years or more left of a career by then. I only recently completed my masters so I’m used to intense study as an adult and I can afford it financially. But am I just deluded?

I’m a year younger than 2chooze, and their post is almost exactly what I would have written. I am hoping to finish by 55. I cannot see how I could survive another 15 to 20 years of this. I am certainly not unusual amongst my peers. I was one of the happier, more energetic and idealistic ones. Everyone is burning out. Lots of people are trying to escape - whether it is early retirement, going to pharma or emigrating.

FY (house jobs in my day) are not the worst of it. Although we still did 24 on calls and unbroken weekends during house jobs, and had moved to a shift pattern by the following year, the SHO years (CMT/IMT now) were tough - 3 expensive postgraduate exams in short succession, each with a 25% pass rate - so I was doing full days/12 hr on-calls, and then coming home and studying until the small hours of the morning because I didn’t want to waste any more money that I could ill afford, grabbing a couple of hours sleep and then up and at it again.
In the registrar years, you rotate from hospital to hospital across a region of the country - the deaneries attempt to limit commutes to 1 hour, but this is not always possible due to balancing experience and geography. You are essentially uprooting your plans every 12 months unless you get a London NTN, or you have a nanny.

On top of that, you are expected to produce a good body of publications, audit, quality improvement projects, etc at each stage of training to be competitive for the next. This was not a problem for me as I was childless, but I see so many of my trainees struggling to balance these demands with a physically draining job and trying to have some family life.

I didn’t have children until I was an established consultant. I have huge respect for the juniors who do. At least I have a reputation and a degree of autonomy in comparison now.

You say that you would qualify at 47. I could not imagine putting myself through the rigours of junior doctor training at my age with commitments to a long term partner and family.

The soonest you could become a consultant would be 55/56, and that would be having gone straight through without having gone out of programme to do an MD/PhD. You would be able to complete GP training a bit sooner.

Think carefully if you want to do this. Try to envisage what it is that you feel is drawing you to do this. What do you think your day to day tasks will involve at each stage of training and once you become a consultant/GP? And then speak to doctors and compare your expectations to their day to day experience. There is huge potential for disillusionment after having spent immense effort and money.

It isn’t medicine itself that is the problem. It can still be challenging, stimulating and rewarding - but working in the NHS is soul-destroying.

I do think all the posters who are saying ‘follow your dreams’ etc have no clue what you would be signing up for

Hmmm, no, OP, none of the doctors I know work past 55

Hi op, I’m with those that suggest a different role in a shorter time. Really pin down what it is about medicine that appeals to you. If it’s working with people who are ill, then nurses do more of that than doctors! Physios are really hands on but need less training & work kinder hours. I’m sure there are other roles too. I just think it’s really punishing training to be a doctor and all of your relationships will suffer. But changing careers is very possible.

I recently read a book Breaking And Mending by Joanna Cannon (Kindle) This lady became a doctor in later life, it was a good read and may give you a good insight. Good Luck with whichever path you choose to take.

@Summerfun54321

I think if it was your calling in life you’d be doing it already.

Not necessarily and there are many examples out there

Do it! It might be hard or you might breeze through, you’ll only know if you try.

Just Google ‘training to be a doctor at 40’. There’s some really inspiring people who’ve successfully juggled medical training alongside their daily family life and they are thriving. There’s even one lady’s story who who was a cleaner in a hospital and she had to sit her GCSEs, so she had to begin at the very bottom. She qualified and is now a doctor in her local A&E. You obviously won’t have longevity in your career but so what, you could make a huge difference to someone’s life one day and who knows where it’ll take you.

Just graduated with my law degree and now seeking barrister pupillage - at 49! It is so common now that people change careers mid-life which is becoming increasingly recognised in professional fields.

I know people think I'm too old to do this but I just DGAF. I will live the life I want and if someone will give me the opportunity to learn then I'm going to take it and succeed.

I've dealt with a lack of self-belief because I spent too much time listening to others telling me I wouldn't do it or I shouldn't do it for whatever reason. Some say don't do it because the work is hard with long hours - I say "great, bring it on" - I'm ready for that level of challenge in my life now!

Life is what you make it. Kids grow up and become more self-sufficient and you need to plan for the life you want after that happens.

Most importantly don't stop striving for your dreams until you know with absolute certainty that the door is bolted shut. Only you know your motivations and desires and if you want to do it then go for it!

Good luck!

In my final year of an AHP degree, this has been hard enough with a family. I love it though. I will have the options of private (could be lucrative I suppose) or NHS work once I graduate plus the hours are kinder- as is predominantly a day type role.

I definitely wouldn't want to be a GP at the moment it sounds incredibly thankless and stressful- not for all of the money in the world. A large proportion of their time must be reading online forms these days on top of having to fit in patients.

It is definitely worth looking at different options not just medicine and nursing. There are many options that can be easier to fit around family life- but you can still have a lot of options to you.

If you really do want to be a doctor though then go for it.

I my experience, people who choose to train to be medical doctor later in life, as opposed to choosing to train as an allied health professional are elitist snobs who want to 'be the best'. Give over.

Warwick Is grad entry only and take those with Arts backgrounds. But it’s very competitive to get into medicine and grad entry additionally. And it will be intense. But known people do it in their 40s.

I've seen above that trainees get paid £34-£38k.
Basic salary for an FY1 is £24994.

And regarding student loans (someone said we didn't need them due to govt bursary), I'm 5 years post grad and still owe student loan company £33000.

Nor read whole thread, but could use the five whys technique to help uncover why exactly you feel compelled to be a doctor? Could well be the true reason may be satisfied with something else.

To be blunt OP... if you can't be arsed to reply to your own thread, I don't think you're cut out for the rigours of a career in medicine

Getting into med school is doable, I'm mid 30s and am there now. I have had a demanding career beforehand, so am no stranger to travel, responsibility, shifts, deadlines, silly hours and crisis work. However, obv I have no experience yet of being a junior Dr and am expecting a big shock even still.

If you go for this, I would recommend the Grad entry route, not A levels. Much better funded and with the gamsat, (and I think UKCAT), you can resit twice a year, rather than bank on getting top grades first time. You'll need healthcare experience, mine was a variety of volunteering. The GAMSAT is a tough exam. If you can afford it, spend some money on a prep course and get it done first time round. It's more about understanding the strategy than knowledge.

Response from doctor friends has been mixed between 'do it! Hard work but you'll love it' and 'no way, only if it's your raison d'etre at this stage'. But the flaw here that I think I can see is that it would be much harder to countenance doing the training years at a later age having done it once already, compared to fulfilling an ambition for the first time. Granted stamina etc would be lower than at 18 but older starters I know have been overall positive at around the 10-15 year mark.

I don't agree that if you'd really wanted this, you'd have done it already. Most (not all)of the doctors I know, and the younger students on my course (who missed out first time and applied straight after a biomedical degree) have considerable privilege and family support. Not everyone has this so it only becomes apparent that medicine is an option later on. This was the case for me.

Just my 2p worth after considering this very hard over a few years, obviously not wanting to counter the experience of actual doctors on here, as someone said, med school is the easy bit.

Have you had friends go through the junior doctor process? The overnight shifts, 80 hour weeks, having to move hospitals every 6 months so potentially needing to move house frequently or face long commutes, having your days off dictated with no flexibility…

If you want to help people and money is not an issue then what about social work or fostering or similar?

@TwinsTrollsAndHunz

Nursing is not a career for Drs who missed the boat (for whatever reason). This idea that people become nurses (or other HCPs) because they ‘couldn’t be doctors’ is very frustrating. They are totally different, equally valuable professions in the chain of patient care, though there are some nursing roles that align with some medical roles (eg ANP & Physician Associate).

The training is tough on family life, perhaps not as bad as medical training due to deaneries and duration but like medicine, it needs a commitment to lifelong learning, CPD and further exams and qualifications to move up the ranks. It’s not the ‘easy route’. The dropout rate of the course and the recruitment and retention rates of qualified nurses should tell anyone that.

As I said earlier I considered medicine but realised I couldn't do it, and am now considering nursing. While I never said it is 'the easy route,' it is actually possible to retrain as a nurse given my circumstances.

With medicine it is only available full time and required a very competitive entry examination and huge student loans.

With nursing there is a paid, part-time course in my city, 8.45pm to 1.45pm over four years. I could work and study in those hours and still pick up my kids from school. There is a hospital across the road from me where I could do a placement and the coordinator there has said he will give me a job if I do the training there, and i can work any hours I want.

There is so much demand for nurses here (not UK) that they bend over backwards to make you sign up.

As for medicine, never in a million years would my health (I have a chronic disease) or family commitments accommodate night shifts, travelling all over the country and full time study.

Not the easy route so much as the feasible one for my overall situation.

Has OP even been back?

No, not to comment anyway.
Maybe they are reading

I'm early 40s and I would hate to complete med school & the gruelling training whilst experiencing perimenopause. Don't underestimate the effects of perimenopause on your body. Plus, the signs of ageing whilst considering a career change later in life.

@Dalalalada

I my experience, people who choose to train to be medical doctor later in life, as opposed to choosing to train as an allied health professional are elitist snobs who want to 'be the best'. Give over.

An aquaintance retrained as a doctor in his early 30s, leaving a very successful career in marketing.

His second child was born with many serious medical complications. He was so inspired by the medical care his child received, he decided he wanted to retrain as a doctor.

I have never viewed his decision to retrain as a doctor as anything other than amazing. I never thought to query why he didn’t become a speech therapist, OT, physio, pharmacist, nurse, Porter, play specialist or any of the other amazing professionals they have encountered. Who knew it was because he was an “elitist snob”…

I did my degree and trained as a teacher in my late 30s with primary aged children, that was hard enough. I come from a medical family so considered medicine for all of five minutes before dismissing it as undoable if I wanted to have any sort of family life. I saw the toll medicine took on my brothers (and their wives), especially when their children were little, years of long shifts, much travel and endless and expensive professional qualifications to study for.

If you really want to do it it's certainly not impossible. I started Graduate Entry Medicine in my 40's. I then compounded the madness by having a baby at 46. Despite the awful warnings you see here, from people who seem to think anyone much over 50 starts a rapid decline from senility to death, I'm now 60 and coping fine with being a GP and a mother to a teenager.

I absolutely love my job, have no intention of retiring any time soon, and have never regretted the career change. The pay is reasonable, and for a salaried GP, whose pay is mainly determined by supply and demand, it's a lot better than implied by some posters above.

The junior doctor years are undoubtedly hard, you have very little control over your working life, and I was astonished by how badly hospitals treat their junior medical staff. I would definitely recommend 'This is going to hurt' by Adam Kay, for an idea as to what you would face. However, even on my worst shifts, I was constantly learning, and there was almost always something that happened that made me grateful that I'd been given the opportunity to be there.

I think to be a happy doctor you need a passionate interest in medicine and biology, to be very intelligent (If you can do well on GAMSAT without much preparation you'll be fine), and to like helping people. It also helps to have a supportive home life (I have an amazing DH).

@DrDinosaur it's lovely to hear an encouraging, positive experience! I'm 42 and in my 3rd year of a 4 year course, so I'm very glad to know there is hope and it's not all doom and gloom, as some would have us believe!😅

Why can't medical schools just take more students? I am not a doctor but I did work for some years in an admin role in a medical school. It's a very complicated degree course to organise and run well. TLDR: you can't increase numbers at the drop of a hat.

If there was a shortage of History graduates (say), the university could fairly easily recruit some more History academics to do the teaching and marking and supervise the students' dissertations, look at ways of finding more rooms for teaching (my own employer used top notch marquees on the grass for a bit when some rooms were being refurbished), check that the library resources would be sufficient (much easier now so much is accessed online instead of in hard copy) and (if they were sensible) also boost the admin support. Admissions decisions are straightforward. Does the applicant have History A level or equivalent with a good grade, and other decent qualifications? Does the personal statement convincingly make a case for wanting to spend three years studying History? In you come.

There's so much more to think about for a Medicine degree. You need a rigorous admissions stage to try to weed out the unsuitable people at the outset, and that requires clinicians and lay people to interview (usually), which is time-consuming in itself.

You also need to run practical exams as well as written exams and other assignments. The practical exams (OSCEs) are a massive undertaking, involving finding clinicians to come out of their frontline NHS jobs for a day or a half-day to act as markers, actors to come in and take on the patient role, actual patients willing and suitable to be examined by a succession of students, lots of invigilators and administrators to keep things running to time, lots and lots of rooms, equipment, partitions, technician support, all needed over several days.

Teaching: medical students spend time in lectures and seminars like other students, but they also have to learn clinical skills and that requires specialist teaching rooms and equipment, and technician support as well as clinicians employed to do the teaching, often alongside a clinical job.

And then there are the placements. Every medical school has a contract with various NHS trusts and GP practices to provide these placements, for which the NHS is paid. The quid pro quo is that the clinicians in the Trusts and practices have to provide not just a range of experience but also teaching and assessment. That takes a lot of time away from clinical duties and means there are administrators employed in the Trusts who deal just with medical students. At my place some students ended up spending a whole year on placement 50+ miles from the university so they were provided with accommodation at the hospital.

The numbers available can't be expanded at the drop of a hat. We all know the NHS is stretched to breaking point already, so hospitals and GP practices are not going to prioritise taking more students over patient care.

And finally, there's pastoral care. My impression is that decades ago it was sink or swim at medical school. Nowadays there is a lot more support given to students and attention paid to trying to help them with the emotional demands of their training, which are considerable. They work so hard and have a lot of tough stuff to process, while also adjusting, like other students, to being away from home, living independently etc etc (I'm talking about those who go to university straight from school here, obviously, but older students will have different challenges and it won't be an easy ride, as many here have made plain).

There are probably lots more things that make it difficult to expand numbers of medical students. These are just some things I noted when I was working. Needs huge planning and investment, and possibly (cloudcuckooland here, though) a huge rethink about how the medical profession operates to make medicine a more viable career option for people over 30, especially those with families, who face a huge uphill struggle to qualify, for all the reasons set out very ably in this thread by doctors and their loved ones.