I had always planned to retire at 60.  That was the expectation … that was the plan that we all signed up to when I entered General Practice.  When John retired six years ago, and I became Senior Partner, I realised that I could not continue full-time to sixty, as he had done.  The recruitment and retention crisis was really starting to bite in Gosport, and our workload and the pressure of work was beginning to rise exponentially.  In my mind, sixty became fifty-eight and, in the last two years, I have even started to consider retirement as early as fifty-seven.

I turn fifty-six this December but, while I am determined to prove – at least to myself – that I can still do the job, I have decided to retire next year, at the end of February.  I want to retire from my desk, and not my ‘sick-bed.’  I want to go on my own terms.

The early weeks of my sick leave were spent working out what had happened to me and letting the stresses and the emotions slowly drain away.  Only then, could I start to consider my options.

I am employed as a GP Partner, so I could resign my Partnership, and become a salaried GP, but there is minimal difference between the two roles, so it would gain me little.  Anyway, I would be treated the same by staff and patients, and probably act the same too, so I would have to be in another Practice if there was to be real change, and I want to retire from the same Practice I had joined in 1990.  Doing locum work does not appeal.  Sure, there is none of the admin workload that takes up so much time, but I couldn’t bear to swap that gain for the loss of the longstanding doctor-patient relationships that I and my patients enjoy.  I could reduce the number of sessions I work, but that would not really address my tendency to overwork, and my income would then be little different to what I would get from my pension.

In considering my options, one thing was certain: I could not return to the limitless pattern of work that had made me so unwell, because I would surely hit the buffers again.

Over the many weeks that followed, there was much thought and careful analysis of my motives and of our finances.  Much soul-searching too: balancing the realisation that I could not return to work with the intensity I had given it for so many years; against my guilt at abandoning my colleagues, and depriving our patients, our town, of yet another GP. Looking back, I am ashamed to see how focused my mind was upon my work situation, and how blinkered I was to my work-life balance. The decision seems so much easier, so straightforward, now that I have woken up to the effect of my over-working on our family life, and the chance that I now have to start afresh, and to spend more time with Sylvia, our children and our grandson.