Karen, works part-time positions

Karen      
Physician, Internal Medicine 
41 years old
Married, with 1 child, 10 yrs old
Husband is a writer/teacher

Current job profile:

Works one part-time job in an office-based practice and a second part-time “corporate” job, as a medical chart reviewer. 

Why have you made these job choices?  It sounds like a complicated way to work part time.

Well, this works for me since I’m somewhere in between working full-time and part-time.  We’re lucky because my husband serves as the primary care giver at home, and the flexibility in my schedule lets me be there when I need to be.  Balancing my family and professional needs has been the driving force in this, but there were also financial considerations.  Primary care physicians who accept insurance (including Medicare and Medicaid) simply don’t earn that much money for the time spent caring for extremely complex patients.  However, I don’t want to work in a practice that doesn’t accept insurance.  So I split my time, earn a decent wage and protect myself from burn out or boredom. 

What are the particular arrangements at your practice?  How does it work for the other physicians in the practice? 

We have 4 physicians (and two nurse practitioners and a physician assistant), two of whom are partners and working pretty much full time, and the third who, like me, is an employee/non-partner working 3-4 days a week.  She splits her time between the practice and teaching.  Our arrangements have evolved over time. 

How do you handle on-call hours?

Generally, we each take on-call one night per week and every 4th-6th weekend.  But we’re flexible when things come up.  We’ve also recently turned over our inpatient responsibilities to hospitalists.

What are some particular advantages or disadvantages of your job arrangement?

The flexibility that I have at my corporate job, which comes from not having any direct patient care responsibilities, allows me to make calls and take time if I need to for family or personal things that may come up.  I also avoid a lot of office politics since I’m in neither place for very long each week.
I do not, however, have full-time benefits.  I must buy my own health insurance, for instance.  I participate in retirement plans and receive an employer contribution from both employers.  I am also able to participate in the Flexible Spending Plan at my corporate job.  I receive paid vacation in my clinical practice but not from my corporate job.  Some of the benefits were negotiable and some were not.

What do you wish you knew then that you know now?  What advice would you give someone considering a part-time position?

I wish I’d known how much I really needed to know about running a business.  I’d never have become a partner/owner of the practice.  My interests and real strengths are patient care.  As a part-time employee that’s all I have to focus on.

Be very careful to work out the part-time arrangement.  It’s easy to get drawn into more responsibility and end up basically working full-time while getting compensated for a part-time position.

Other comments?

It’s not “one size fits all” when it comes to working part time or in a non-traditional schedule.  For example, I started with the practice on a part-time basis, then became a partner, and now have gone back to part-time as an employee so that I could expand elsewhere.  It has also helped to work in an all-women group.  Perhaps women are less hung up about titles, career tracks, etc., which gives us the freedom to take the path that works best for us.