The next stage of the solution to the physician shortage entails keeping doctors in the profession long term. To this end, immediate solutions must be provided for dealing with burnout and overload, and ensuring professional prestige and opportunities for professional/managerial promotion, with an eye to the future.

For example, to ensure that young doctors specializing in the specialty fields in crisis will persist in their field of choice long term, awards for length of service and seniority should be considered for doctors who remain loyal to their specialty.

Family doctors in particular suffer from burnout due to the large number of patients they receive, the short time allocated to each visit, high patient turnover, and lack of breaks during work hours. Allocating more time for each consultation, thereby reducing the number of patient visits per hour, would help curtail the trend of family doctors abandoning the profession.

Establishing professional specialty units throughout the periphery, in which the position of unit director would offer the doctor an opportunity for professional promotion, could help keep doctors in the periphery long term.

Another proposition to ameliorate both the physician shortage in the periphery and in specialties in crisis would be to develop the opportunity for professional promotion by instituting additional days of continuing education, and encouraging employers to allow doctors to realize this option.

Retaining doctors in their profession long term will require specific solutions to the persisting problem of work overload, and options to employ doctors where there is no alternative of working in the private sector. For example, in some professions in which there is a shortage, and in the periphery, there will be an option for full-time work during the day in peripheral hospitals (the so-called "Full Timer").

In order to achieve an effective, comprehensive and long-term resolution to the physician shortage – that will transform the harsh reality delineated in this report – a solution must be implemented that combines higher staffing standards, incentives to attract doctors to the profession, and incentives to retain doctors in their profession long term, along the lines of the examples above.