Academic clinician educators: Confronting the challenges to successful retirement

Background The academic clinician-educator (CE) often has a career spanning 40 or more years. Retirement represents the last stage of one's professional identity. Planning for retirement can be both exciting and challenging. Although it would seem reasonable that there would be research addressing the transition to retirement that incorporates guidance on important decisions or pathways to retirement with outcomes related to satisfaction, adjustment, or fulfillment in retirement, in fact, there is minimal such research. As CEs, the recently retired authors have drawn on our experiences in pediatrics as the foundation for our inquiry. The authors suggest that retirement decisions and needs differ in academic health center (AHC) faculty from those in health-care private practice. As an example, we suggest that CEs in all specialties, and likely other senior faculty in the health sciences, may have unique opportunities in retirement to enrich their institutions and their specialty organizations. The gaps we have encountered and our experiences in the retirement process have resulted in this paper, in which we encourage research that will inform more substantial, timely, and practical advice going forward. Methods Our exploration of retirement from AHC careers includes two foci: (1) A review of relevant literature on retirement issues the CE, AHC, and national educator organizations might consider important in this transition process; and (2) the description of a theoretical framework known as Conservation of Resources Theory simply to help organize perspectives on the losses, gains, or conservation of tangible and intangible resources to weigh in the planning and transition process. Results Several considerations relevant to retirement planning, both specific to academic faculty retirement in the health sciences and to retirement planning more broadly, emerged from our literature exploration. However, there were virtually no studies addressing these considerations, both personal and professional, accompanied by tracking their impact on satisfaction or well-being once in retirement. Discussion Emerging from our examination of literature and our experiences in transitioning to retirement are a number of questions deserving of further study, likely in longitudinal, comparative or more broadly in global inquiries, in the effort to develop models to guide the retiring academic CE. Over the next decade, there will be so many faculty members considering or negotiating retirement that there is an urgent need to develop and study models that both inform this process and monitor outcomes in terms of satisfaction with the retirement years.