Have you ever heard someone say, “I chose healthcare as a profession because I love long hours, reams of paperwork, and unrelenting stress”?
We haven’t either. Chances are that you became an OB clinician because you wanted to spend your work hours taking care of moms and babies. And when your work hours were over, you wanted to own your own time. But like many clinicians in private practice, maybe you’ve found that your work hours are never truly over, and your time is never fully your own.
If that’s you, you might consider what more than 2,000 clinicians have already discovered: Ob Hospitalist Group (OBHG) can help you reclaim a meaningful work/life balance. Here are five things OBHG could bring to the next chapter of your healthcare career.
1. A schedule you actually control
Most full-time OB hospitalists at OBHG work five to seven 24-hour shifts per month, and they choose which days those are, scheduling well in advance. That’s not a euphemism for “flexible within reason.” It means you can plan around your life instead of the other way around.
Dr. Eric Colton, who spent years missing birthdays, anniversaries, and his kids’ games in private practice, now attends his son’s flag football games and recently took a two-week vacation to the Rocky Mountains. For Dr. Robin Whatley, it means traveling with her family, reading with her book club, and actually using her backyard.
2. No office management, no on-call duty
The OB hospitalist model strips away the administrative weight that makes traditional practice so consuming. No clinic callbacks. No charting from your kitchen table at 10 p.m. No navigating the business side of a practice on top of patient care. Dr. Whatley, who left private practice after years of nonstop clinic, callbacks, and charting, describes the change simply: joining OBHG transformed her career journey. Dr. Teresa Marlino, who once worked 72-hour stretches when patients were in labor back-to-back, no longer has to.
3. When you’re off, you’re off
This sounds basic, but for most OB clinicians it’s radical. OBHG’s model draws a clean line between work and personal time. There’s no slow bleed of responsibility into your evenings and weekends. You can give your best while you’re working, then give yourself permission to disengage. That permission is structural, not aspirational. It’s built into the way the job works.
4. Room for the things that got squeezed out
The schedule doesn’t just free up hours. It returns whole categories of life that private practice tends to consume. One OB/GYN, who once juggled appointments, surgeries, and hospital shifts around the clock, was able to share lunch with her husband and chaperone her daughter’s eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C. One OBHG clinician picked up Irish dancing. Another earned a captain’s license and sails the Puget Sound. These aren’t perks. They’re just what happens when your career stops crowding out everything else.
5. A career that grows without consuming you
Balance doesn’t have to mean standing still. OBHG offers leadership pathways, from site director and market medical director roles to clinical mentorship and the opportunity to work with the next generation of medical students. Dr. Benjamin DeLisa, a site director in Washington, works six shifts a month and still leads annual medical mission trips to the Philippines. The flexibility lets clinicians grow in the directions that matter to them, whether that’s organizational leadership, humanitarian work, or simply getting better at the medicine without burning out in the process.