Ndubuisi 'Andy' Egwim describes leaving clinical medicine for four years to work in an NGO while building a business, gaining leadership, networking, partnership and collaboration skills. On returning to medicine in the UK he noticed a changed perspective: having outside options and flexibility (not being entirely dependent on medicine) made clinical practice more enjoyable and sustainable for him.
If you're listening to this and you're a doctor who wants to move an industry. I left medicine for four years. So after I worked in sort of I finished my first we'll call it house job and all that, I went to work in an NGO and during that period I was building a business and doing several other stuff I enjoyed. It was fantastic. So that two years I worked in an ngo, that's where I got a lot of training about leadership and structure, networking, partnership, collaboration. But when I came over to the uk, so I came back to medicine because coming back to medicine I saw a different aspect of medicine. Four years later when I came in, I realized that if you worked in medicine and you had the flexibility to choose when to come and go, if you weren't entirely dependent on medicine, if you felt you had options, in my own experience I started to enjoy it quite massively.
