Over the past few months, I’ve had more conversations with clinicians who are thinking seriously about leaving healthcare than in all my years practicing. Not because they stopped caring. Not because the work lost its meaning. But because they’re working in environments so chronically and dangerously understaffed that the act of giving care has become inseparable from the act of trying to survive the day.

That’s the part that hurts the most.

Most people who choose healthcare do it out of a sense of calling. They’re wired to show up, to help, to steady a worried hand, to keep trying when things get complex. But even a calling has limits when the daily reality becomes unsustainable. When doing more with less becomes the norm. When every shift becomes emotional triage simply to keep patients safe. When heroic effort is treated as the baseline expectation.

And I keep hearing the same quiet confession:
“I love my patients, but I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

This is not a failure of resilience. It’s a failure of structures. A failure of investment. A failure of imagination.

We are losing good people not because they are weak, but because no human being can absorb the impact of chronic understaffing, overwhelming patient loads, administrative burden, and the emotional intensity of care without adequate support. And the weight doesn’t stay at work. It follows people home. It disrupts sleep, relationships, parenting, partnerships. It pulls at the threads of personal identity until even life outside the clinic starts to feel fragile.

The workforce crisis we’re witnessing is not a sudden event. It’s the cumulative result of years of ignoring warning signs. Years of patching instead of rebuilding. Years of assuming healthcare workers will always bend, always stretch, always find a way to absorb the impossible.

But the system is now asking people to do what cannot be done, and people are finally saying it out loud.

In my conversations, there’s rarely anger. Mostly there’s grief.
Grief for the care they want to give but can’t.
Grief for the colleagues who have already left.
Grief for the fear of walking away from a calling they’ve woven their lives around.

The answer is not to tell clinicians to “take better care of themselves.”
The answer is to build a system worthy of the people inside it.

A system that funds care at the level of actual need.
A system that treats time with patients as essential.
A system that sees clinician well-being as a structural responsibility, not a personal assignment.
A system that reinvests in the human, emotional, and psychological foundations of care.

Because when caregivers feel forced to choose between their calling and their health, that is not a personal dilemma. That is a system-level failure.

If we want people to stay in healthcare, we have to stop asking them to hold everything together alone.
We need to build something that holds them too.