This weekend I travelled to Norway to visit a friend for her birthday. She wanted to convince me to move and pick up being a doctor again in a much more work-life balance friendly country.

In Germany it is very common to have heard of this trend. It seems like there has a massive movement of doctors who head up north already for a couple of years. Even my parents told me they thought about this long before I could even think about following in their foot steps.

So what makes it so attractive? And what do you need to just do it?

First of all my biggest concern would be the darkness and cold in the winter. I threw it overboard. At least the cold. We stayed in a cabin in the mountains. There was no heating, no water and no electricity. We melted snow to make coffee and grilled sausage on a stick on the camp fire. It was awesome. For me it was the first time ever on skis, when we went cross country through the most surreal and beautiful landscape I have ever seen. It kept us warm anyway. 

While we were there it was actually around the same temperature as in Berlin, just with more snow and especially more sunny hours. In Oslo it also does not become much darker. In the upper north though, like Trondheim or even Tromsø, darkness holds on for a couple of months. It is said, they do have a higher rate of suicide in those areas, but overall suicide rates in Norway seem to be lower than in Germany, France and the USA according to WHO. I still believe that darkness could be quiet hard to deal with, but why not try. Apparently darkness does lead to the generation of great music, if you look at Røyksopp (Tromsø) or Lindstrøm (Stavanger) just to name a few.

Why is this important? I could just move to Oslo? You probably could. But Norway appears to look for specialists and family doctors for more remote areas more than young urban professionals, just as Germany does. The country is quiet sparely inhabited with a population of just about 5 million people on a quiet large area, making the density a scarce 13 inhabitants per square km.

Even though it might be especially easy to open a practice for family medicine in a remote area, it does not seem impossible to start your career in one of the larger hospitals. If you plan to send an application to learn a speciality in Norway, learning the language and doing an internship in Norway during studies could work in your advantage. I don’t yet have more information on how exactly the educational system works.

In general Norway reminded me a lot of the Netherlands. It is a quiet well organised and rich country. Everything is expensive, but people seem to earn more too. When it comes to medicine the first destination is the family doctor. Everybody is health insured by government (taxes) but there is a deductible. There are waiting lists for elective procedures as there are only 3,3 hospital beds per 1000 inhabitants (Germany 8,3 beds). Whereas there are 20% of inhabitants working in the health sector (Germany 11,3%). This might explain the much better work life balance and much lesser everyday pressure for doctors and nurses. A good German article about this and a story on a couple who worked there can be found here.

I am still trying to connect to people living there and I will update this post as soon as I get more information.

If you know anything more detailed let me know here!