Recentering Purpose: How One Family Physician Is Turning Burnout into a Path Forward

Family physician, residency program director and ABFM Diplomate are just a few of the hats Dr. Santina Wheat wears. She is used to guiding both patients and residents through some of the most important moments in their lives, and she loves it. But there was a time when she found herself wrestling with a question many physicians quietly face:

Can I keep doing this?

Dr. Wheat experienced burnout on a personal level that went beyond simply feeling tired at the end of a long day. It was the kind of exhaustion that makes you question your place in a profession you once felt called to serve. She considered leaving both medicine and education.

“The system is set up to be broken,” Dr. Wheat says.

Like many physicians, she felt the pull to step away from a system that often prevents doctors from doing what they most want to do: care for their patients.

“Many people make the decision not to stay and are given advice to diversify their lives. The example I keep giving is real estate, to do something that would not allow you to be controlled by whatever system you are working in,” Dr. Wheat says.

Now, as a participant in the Visiting Scholars Program at the American Board of Family Medicine, Dr. Wheat is working to explore career sustainability in family medicine.

Her clinical world is broad and complex. Dr. Wheat practices in a residency clinic in the Chicago suburbs that serves many Medicare patients and draws from both suburban and nearby rural communities.

She has seen how system pressures can overshadow the parts of medicine that once brought joy. She also sees something new: residents arriving already exhausted.

“I hear the word burnout a lot from my residents,” she says. “Sometimes they mean stress. But sometimes they truly are burned out, and that’s before they have even started their careers.”

For Dr. Wheat, the concern goes beyond individual well-being. It is about the future of the specialty.

Turning Experience Into Inquiry

“If family physicians do not see a sustainable path, we have a problem not just for ourselves, but for the patients and communities who depend on us,” she says.

Through the ABFM Visiting Scholars Program, Dr. Wheat is working with ABFM researchers to examine how burnout, moral injury and career sustainability intersect, especially as more physicians consider part-time work as a coping strategy.

Her goal is not to convince physicians to endure unsustainable systems. It is to identify what would make full-time practice realistic and fulfilling again.

“I do not want the answer to always be that you need to leave medicine,” Dr. Wheat says.

This is where ABFM’s work extends beyond certification. By supporting Diplomates in studying the challenges facing family physicians and turning those experiences into data-driven insights, ABFM helps ensure physician voices shape the future of the specialty.

As a program director, Dr. Wheat sees residency as more than training. It is where expectations about practice are formed.

“The clinic is the biggest learning lab,” she says. “If that learning lab is broken, then residents do not see sustainability as a possibility.”

Her role includes advocating for systems that model a sustainable career: schedules that allow recovery, team structures that reduce administrative overload, and cultures that help physicians maintain purpose.

She is realistic about the limits of individual resilience. Pizza parties and wellness lectures will not solve systemic problems. What matters are structural changes that give physicians more time for the relationships that drew them to medicine.

“The biggest gap right now is time — time to really listen and connect with our patients,” Dr. Wheat says.

That gap is a major source of moral injury: knowing what patients need but feeling unable to deliver it within current constraints.

Dr. Wheat is also watching how tools such as AI scribes may help reduce “pajama time,” the hours spent charting after clinic. For her, the value is not in seeing more patients. It is in being more present with the ones she already has.

“My AI scribe lets me focus on the patient in the room,” she says. “It helps me remember details and follow through, but it does not replace the relationship.”

Recentered Leadership

When asked what she tells residents who feel burned out, Dr. Wheat’s answer is simple.

“Give yourself a little bit of grace,” she says.

She encourages them to celebrate small wins and remember why they chose family medicine. In her program, team meetings now begin with sharing successes, a practice that helps physicians recognize progress in a demanding field.

For Dr. Wheat, recentering her own purpose took time. Leadership development and coaching helped her reflect on what first drew her to family medicine. She realized she remained deeply committed to her community and to improving the systems that shape care.

Those realizations helped her reconnect with the joy and meaning that led her into the specialty.

Through the Visiting Scholars Program, ABFM is helping physicians like Dr. Wheat turn personal struggle into collective progress.

Because sustaining family medicine means sustaining the physicians who make it possible.