← all questions · Burnout and leaving
Most don't leave — they leave the hospital. The accredited low-contact exits are real specialties: medical administration through RACMA 1, public health medicine through RACP's faculty 2, pathology through RCPA 3, radiology through RANZCR 4. Actual Australian attrition out of clinical practice is not published.
There is no published Australian number. Nobody publishes how many doctors leave clinical practice, or what they go to. Treat every "X% of doctors are quitting" headline as either overseas data or a commercial survey — not published for Australia.
The exits that stay inside medicine, and are accredited. Medical administration is a specialty with its own college, RACMA, entered from any clinical background 1. Public health medicine is an RACP faculty: from 1 January 2027, entry requires at least 3 years FTE postgraduate clinical experience plus a Master of Public Health covering epidemiology, biostatistics, health protection, health promotion and health policy, then 36 months FTE of advanced training 2. Pathology through the RCPA and radiology through RANZCR are the other two the sub names constantly 34. None of these is "leaving medicine" — they are leaving the ward round.
The exits that leave clinically but keep the degree. Medical education, research, medico-legal work, health tech and pharma, consulting, health policy. First-hand accounts in the corpus include medical technology executive roles, public-sector project management, full-time academia after a PhD, law, and one game design studio 67.
The two things everyone who did it says. First, the income ceiling is lower without a fellowship, and the structure you are escaping is also a structure that was carrying you: supervised entry, term assessments, a guaranteed next job. Second, losing the identity is harder than losing the job.
And the most common real answer, which is not a career change at all: leave the hospital, not medicine. GP, locum work, or a non-ward specialty fixes the specific complaint — no control over your roster — that people mistake for burnout of the whole profession. If you are deciding this while exhausted, call Drs4Drs on 1300 374 377 first 5.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Often, the grass is not always greener on the other side.
I haven't quit medicine, but I have quit the hospital system and life is significantly better. Don't forget there are specialties outside of hospitals that have the best of both worlds
There are other specialities and areas where you can practice medicine with reduced / no direct patient contact if that's something you might be interested in (e.g. pathology, radiology, public health, medical administration)
I recently left medicine to start a game design studio (my lifelong passion).
Downside is that it felt weird to lose my identity as a doctor after a decade of that.
I thought I was burnt out from medicine. Turns out I just absolutely hated the lack of control and freedom of being contracted to the hospital and having my life controlled by admin.
Asked 53 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(quit|leav|left|exit).{0,35}(medicine|clinical|the profession|hospital)|(career|job).{0,25}(change|transition|outside medicine)|non.?clinical/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring first-hand destination accounts across the two 'what are you doing now' threads, deliberately paired so the 'grass is not greener' top comment sits beside the people who are glad they went.