One in three Swiss medical students ready to leave profession after internships

According to a study by the Swiss Association of Medical Students, 34% of students want to change career path following their end-of-studies internship in a Swiss hospital. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Working as a doctor is one of the most prestigious professions in Switzerland, but the reality seems quite different: one-third of medical students say they are ready to give up after their first internship in a hospital due to the long hours and heavy administrative workload expected in the years ahead.

According to a study by the Swiss Association of Medical Students, 34% of students want to change career path following their end-of-studies internship in a Swiss hospital. This generally takes place in their sixth year of studies and consists of 6-12 months in a hospital helping assistant doctors.

+ Understaffed and overworked: Swiss doctors’ harsh self-diagnosis

Marc Reynaud de la Jara, a fourth-year student at the University of Lausanne and one of the authors of the study, said that when students confront the reality of their profession “they are not ready to make all these sacrifices”.

Under Swiss law, they should not work over 50 hours a week, but in many cases, they average 56 hours a week, he told Swiss public radio RTS.

“At the hospital, doctors today spend a small amount of time with patients. Most is taken up by administrative work,” he said.

+ Urban-rural healthcare divide: fewer doctors in Swiss countryside

The digitalisation of processes also poses significant problems, because the systems are not compatible between hospitals, which wastes a lot of time, the study notes.

Many medical students would like to work part-time when they qualify – 80% if possible. But this still represents around 42 hours a week.

“The situation is getting worse and more and more assistant doctors say they see medical errors, especially because of fatigue,” he noted.  

Students quickly realise that they will not be able to carry out the kind of medicine they would like and that their sacrifices will not allow them to attain their goals.

“They will be tired, overworked and ultimately not the good doctors they would like to be for their patients,” said the study author.

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here. 

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].