Why Are Family Doctors Leaving The Workforce? Retirement, Burnout Creating A U.S. Primary Care 'Brain Drain'

TUESDAY, July 14, 2026 (HealthDay News) — A bad back led Dr. Dale Block to retire from family medicine in 2019, after nearly four decades treating patients.“I was one of those rare three-sport athletes” in high school and college, said Block, 67, who lives in Columbus, Ohio. “I played football in the fall, I played basketball in the winter, and I either played baseball or ran track in the springtime.”Sports helped Block get through college but left him with a lifetime of back and neck issues. A hospitalization for a herniated disk in January 2019 was the final straw, leading him to quit practice and round out his career as an administrator for Ohio’s Medicaid program.“By that time it had been kind of something in the planning, and Mrs. Block was adamant that I should have retired a few years prior,” he said.“But family doctors are really dedicated to their patients and their craft,” Block noted. “Seeing patients back to back to back, never wanting to turn anyone away who needed to be seen, it takes its toll physically, mentally and emotionally.”America is now facing a shortage of family doctors, driven in part by physicians like Block who’ve served their communities for decades and are now ready to kick back, relax and follow other pursuits.“We have a very large generation, the baby boomers, who are now retiring at the natural point in their careers,” said Dr. Jennifer Brull, board chair of the Kansas-based American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). “We want to celebrate their retiring. It’s just that there are a lot of them that are family doctors and primary care physicians, and we will miss them.”But the family medicine crisis also is being driven by younger doctors who are leaving primary care.Physicians are leaving clinical practice at younger ages than ever before, according to a study published in May in The Permanente Journal.The average age of physicians leaving practice in 2024 was 48, nine years younger than found when doctors were surveyed in 2008.Burnout — driven largely by red tape and paperwork — is causing some doctors to throw up their hands, studies say. Lower-than-average pay also can tempt family doctors to consider other specialties or even a career outside clinical medicine.This double-whammy — older doctors retiring and younger doctors quitting — is creating a bind for America when it comes to family medicine.Average folks either can’t find a primary care doctor, or can’t get in to see their doctor because the practice is juggling too many patients.“Doctors went into medicine because they want to help, but so much administrative burden is crowding out the joy that comes from serving patients,” said Dr. Kisha Davis, Maryland-based president-elect of the AAFP.“There are some docs who maybe would have worked another five to 10 years, maybe they were 65 and would have kept going until they were 70 or 75, who are now saying, 'I’m out,' ” Davis said. “And you’re also seeing that in younger physicians, docs who are in their 50s who aren’t working as long as previous generations did.”Low Prestige Job?Last year, the United States had only about 77% of the family doctors the nation needs to provide adequate care to Americans — 111,900 docs versus a demand for 146,300, according to a November 2025 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.By 2037, that gap is expected to increase to 73%, with only 116,330 available docs and a projected demand for 159,550, the study said.Family doctors must be jacks-of-all-trades, which can be immensely satisfying to people with a bent toward puzzle solving, said Dr. Rebecca Andrews, a primary care doctor in Connecticut and immediate past chair of the American College of Physicians.These docs must have a broad knowledge of all aspects of medicine, so they can identify any health problem a patient might present and refer them to the proper specialist if necessary.Family medicine is considered the gateway to medicine — the first stop people take in their journey to figure out what is ailing them.“We have to be able to do 80% of medicine, while some specialists have the luxury of developing expertise into 20% of medicine,” Andrews said. “But that’s what makes us great at patient care. We get to look at how things interact and intercede.”Despite the complexity of the job, “primary care is often treated as just low prestige,” she noted.This is partly reflected by what family doctors are paid.Family doctors made about $288,000 on average in 2025, according to Medscape’s 2026 Physician Compensation Report. Pediatricians made even less, around $266,000 a year.That lags the $386,000 average annual pay for doctors across all fields of medicine, the report said. Practitioners in eight specialties earned more than $500,000 on average, including orthopedists, cardiologists, radiologists, plastic surgeons, anesthesiologists, urologists, gastroenterologists and otolaryngologists.“It’s not like you’re poor, but family medicine along with pediatrics, we’re the lowest-paid specialties,” said Dr. Teresa Zyrd, a family doctor in Xenia, Ohio, who retired this year.Overall, primary care accounts for about 5% of all the money spent on healthcare in the United States, despite the central role that family doctors play, said Dr. Caroline Richardson, a practicing family medicine physician and chair of family medicine at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island.“In other countries it’s 30% to 40%, and most Americans think it should be about 50% because that’s their perception of the burden,” Richardson said. “We’re down to around 4% to 5% in most states in this country, and that’s not going to work. We’re never going to get enough primary care doctors that way.”Block agreed.“Primary care manages close to 40% of all patient care, yet they’re at 5%, maybe 10% in some good states of total health expenditure,” Block said.Burnout And PaperworkExperts said hassles associated with the role of a family doctor are contributing to burnout.Nearly 1 in 10 family physicians (8%) changed practices or quit the profession between 2016 and 2020, researchers reported in March in JAMA Internal Medicine. That study found that family docs reporting burnout were nearly 50% more likely to quit or move to another field, compared with doctors who aren't burned out.Primary care doctors in the U.S. are more likely to experience burnout compared to docs in nearly all other wealthy nations, according to a November 2025 report from The Commonwealth Fund.More than 2 out of 5 (43%) U.S. primary care physicians reported feeling burned out, compared to 38% in Canada and New Zealand; 34% in the U.K. and Sweden; 32% in Australia; 25% in France and Germany; 19% in Switzerland; and 11% in The Netherlands, the report said.About 45% of U.S. primary care doctors experiencing burnout say they are dissatisfied with practicing medicine, a clear sign they might quit, according to The Commonwealth Fund report.By comparison, only 9% of doctors who aren’t burned out say they’re fed up with medicine, the report said.Interference from insurance companies is a prime cause of stress and burnout, Zyrd said.“Having a family doctor who knows what they’re doing is one of the biggest positives in healthcare,” she said. “But insurance companies have tended to take over, and they tell you what you can and can’t do, even though they’re not necessarily physicians.“They require lots of documentation, pre-authorizations, and all of that gets frustrating because you don’t want to do paperwork,” Zyrd continued. “If you say, 'I need this person to have a chest X-ray,' you don’t need somebody saying, 'well, prove it.' It’s always like pushing the boulder up the hill.”More than 2 out of 5 American primary care doctors reporting burnout said that their administrative burden was the primary cause, according to The Commonwealth Fund report. These tasks included filing insurance, chasing down payments and documenting patient visits.By comparison, even though U.S. doctors are under pressure to see more patients due to supply and demand, this doesn’t appear to contribute to burnout.Only 14% of American primary care doctors experiencing burnout cited the size of their patient pool as the reason, The Commonwealth Fund report said.Electronic health records also have added to a family doctor’s paperwork woes, resulting in what physicians call “pajama time” — time off the clock that they spend tapping away at a keyboard, updating patients’ charts and passing along messages.On top of that, patient portal messaging has taken off in the U.S., providing people with more access to their doctors through the clinic’s website.Portal messages from patients more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, increasing from an average of one message per patient per year to two and a half messages per patient, according to a study published in June in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Despite the increase in messages, phone calls to doctors’ offices dropped only 6%, the study found. At the same time, office visits increased by 17%.“You end the day and then walk into portal messages,” Davis said. “There’s an expectation of availability and accessibility all the time, and so these patient portal messages, they really kind of add up.”The Value Of Family MedicineNow retired, Zyrd, 72, stuck with medicine longer than she wanted, delaying her retirement for a few years as a favor to a new boss. Eventually, “I just got tired of dealing with all of the new changes that were coming,” she said.In addition, “I wanted to spend more time with my family,” Zyrd said. “Two and a half years ago, I became a grandma. I have a granddaughter and my son in San Diego, so I wanted to have more time to go back and forth. I wanted to have more time to spend with my husband and travel.”Recent retiree Block thinks things went wrong for family medicine when doctors started working for health systems rather than running their own practices.“Docs didn’t want to be in independent practice anymore,” he said. “They didn’t want to be businessmen. They simply wanted to see patients. And the result of that movement essentially took autonomy away from physicians. And that hit primary care docs, I think, much harder than specialty medicine.”Block suspects government intervention will be needed to turn things around, with new laws requiring more pay and better support for primary care.Doctors also might need to become businesspeople again, entering into new models of care that will let them regain their autonomy, he said.Davis, meanwhile, said it also might help if the healthcare industry at large gets a handle on just how much primary care contributes to the health of Americans.“You think about hospitals opening up a new stroke center or cancer center,” she said. “Those are really expensive. They bring money into the hospital. But you don’t see them opening institutes of primary care that could actually save money in the long term, right? “Instead of putting in a big fancy facility to treat the stroke that has already happened, if we invested even a quarter of those finances in preventing that stroke from happening in the first place through primary care, the patient would be better off and the system would save money, too,” Davis said.More informationThe AAMC, a group representing medical education programs, has more on the primary care shortage in the U.S.SOURCES: Dr. Dale Block, Columbus, Ohio; Dr. Teresa Zyrd, Xenia, Ohio; Dr. Jennifer Brull, board chair, American Academy of Family Physicians; Dr. Kisha Davis, president-elect, American Academy of Family Physicians; Dr. Rebecca Andrews, primary care doctor and immediate past chair, American College of Physicians; Dr. Caroline Richardson, chair of family medicine, Brown University Warren Alpert Medical School; The Permanente Journal, May 7, 2026; Journal of General Internal Medicine, Nov. 18, 2025; Medscape, 2026 Physician Compensation Report, May 15, 2026; JAMA Internal Medicine, March 30, 2026; The Commonwealth Fund, The Causes and Impacts of Burnout Among Primary Care Physicians in 10 Countries, Nov. 20, 2025; Journal of the American Medical Association, June 22, 2026 .Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

Why Are Family Doctors Leaving The Workforce? Retirement, Burnout Creating A U.S. Primary Care 'Brain Drain'

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