Get A Shift On

David Birchmore
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Get A Shift On is a podcast for healthcare professionals who've started thinking "I want out." Real stories from people who left and built something else. You're good at the job. That was never the question. The real question is whether you can keep doing it for another 10 or 15 years, and what it costs your health, your family and your sanity if you stay. Host David Birchmore spent over 25 years in and around healthcare, as a radiographer, managing clinical systems, and in international medical technology and business development, before leaving to build his own business. He coaches healthcare professionals through career change, and he talks to people who've already made it: radiographers, AHPs, nurses, doctors, managers and operational leads who walked away from the healthcare system and took a different path. Walking away from a stable system with a family depending on you is a hard choice. Staying often feels worse. Every episode gets into what that decision actually involves: The commercial worth of your clinical experience, and the transferable skills you don't know you haveThe money question, the real financial numbers, minimum viable income, and how close the fear turns out to be to realityPortfolio careers, and building a business as a clinicianNHS redundancy, and leaving the NHS on your own termsThe identity side nobody warns you about, the bit where you stop being "the radiographer" and work out who you are instead Honest conversations about leaving healthcare and what comes after. For experienced healthcare professionals who've mentally already left, and want to know what to do first. New stories every episode, out weekly.

Episodes

  1. 10 Oct

    8 Years a Radiographer. Now Building a Media Career Alongside His NHS Job

    Good at the job and no idea what else you could do? Ravi Desai is a therapeutic radiographer building a career in media alongside his NHS job. He started with a podcast, seven episodes ago, in the hour after work. He tells David Birchmore, a former therapeutic radiographer himself: What one day in his first year taught him that an office job never wouldHow weeks of treating the same patients made him a good interviewer before he’d recorded a minuteWhat he does with the first hour after work, when all he wants is the sofaDavid’s view: the job for life has gone, and a career built on someone else’s expectation is built on a fault line. If you’re a nurse, radiographer, physio, midwife or doctor who thinks you’ve got no skills outside healthcare, this episode is for you. By the way, if you’re still in a role you’ve mentally already left, there’s a free two-minute quiz that tells you where you stand: https://david-a0a3cnqe.scoreapp.com/ Follow Ravi Desai: Website: https://linktr.ee/The.RAD.Motivation LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravi-desai-89604b48/ R.A.D. Motivation Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3KftNmwXFN2eD5eki7ofbu Follow David / Via Nova here: David’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbirchmore/ Get A Shift On is sponsored by Clockwork CRM. Built in Britain, one system for your contacts, sales, projects and email, with real people on support. If you’re building a business, get the admin in one place from day one. Free 14-day trial, no card needed: https://clockworkcrm.com/get-started

  2. 24 Sept

    S2: E4 Children's Palliative Care and The Wrong Order of Things | Dr Michelle Hills

    Dr Michelle Hills on children's palliative care, storytelling, and the book publishers said nobody would buy. Get A Shift On S2 E6. Most people think palliative care starts at the very end. Dr Michelle Hills has spent nearly 25 years proving otherwise. She's a paediatric palliative care consultant working across hospitals, children's hospices and family homes. She's looked after thousands of children with shortened lives, and the families around them. Palliative care, as she describes it, runs from the point of diagnosis all the way through to death and bereavement. Sometimes it starts before a baby is even born. The turning point came at the Houses of Parliament. She told one story, watched it connect, and realised that teaching other doctors would never be enough. The public needed to understand this too. That speech became The Wrong Order of Things, published this month by Mirror Books, built from anonymised composite stories of real children. Agents and publishers loved her writing and told her the subject mattered. Then they said nobody would buy a book like this. One agent said something she carried through every rejection after that: you only need one yes. In this episode: What paediatric palliative care actually involves, from diagnosis through to bereavement supportWhy families fear the referral more than the illness, and what changes when someone explains itMorphine, sedation and symptom control, and why good symptom management can mean people live longerWithdrawing treatment, what's legal in the UK, and what the public doesn't realise is possibleWhy hospices are full of hydrotherapy pools, cinema rooms and trips outTalking to your own children about death, funerals and what they'd wantWriting the book: the rejections, the imposter syndrome, and getting flagged by the algorithm for explaining morphineWhy she's stayed at 80% clinical and calls it a job that has grown rather than shiftedMichelle also talks about her own family, sitting with her father as he died, explaining death to her husband who had never seen it, and coming home late to stand at her children's bedroom door watching their chests go up and down. There's talk of children dying in this episode. If that's close to home right now, go gently. Worth listening to if you're a parent, a healthcare professional, or someone who's been avoiding a conversation you know you need to have. Follow Michelle and get the book here: The Wrong Order of Things (Mirror Books) is on Amazon, in bookshops, on Kindle, and as an audiobook read by Michelle on Audible and Spotify. All of Michelle's links: https://linktr.ee/dr_michelle_hills Michelle's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-hills-b848b589/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michellehills_dr Follow David / Via Nova here: David's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbirchmore/ Are you ready to leave healthcare? Still in a role you've mentally already left? Answer 15 questions and find out exactly where you stand, and what to do first. Take the free 2 min quiz here: https://david-a0a3cnqe.scoreapp.com/ Get A Shift On is sponsored by Clockwork CRM. Built in Britain, one system for your contacts, sales, projects and email, with real people on support. If you're building a business, get the admin in one place from day one. Free 14-day trial, no card needed: https://clockworkcrm.com/get-started

  3. 18 Jul

    S2:E3 | They Turned Down £70k to Stay in New Zealand. Here's Why.

    "No one told me it's gonna be this hard." James and Rebecca run Milford Specialist Recruitment from New Zealand, placing UK and Irish radiographers, sonographers and MRI radiographers into private roles across New Zealand and Australia. They've lived every step of what their candidates go through, because their own move went wrong first. Recruiters told them to fly out and the jobs would follow. What followed was one page of vacancies, six to eight months of fighting to get on their feet, and a £70k job offer from the UK arriving two months in, when neither of them had work. They said no. Then they built a recruitment business that does what nobody did for them. We get into: The move itself: residency, health assessments, flipping the wedding to Crete, and renting out their first homeWhy they said no to going back, and the older couple whose words made the decision for them: "we live in regret"What radiographers actually earn over there. Around £10k above NHS pay at two to three years' experience, with Australia paying more againThe lifestyle maths: expensive groceries, free everything else, finishing at 4pm on a Friday, on-call one week in five, five weeks' holiday and a wellness dayPensions (12% super in Australia, KiwiSaver and NZ Super in New Zealand) and ACC accident coverPorsche keys on gym hooks and wallets left on restaurant tables. What safety feels like when you stop noticing itWhy NHS training is favoured by employers there, and how Ahpra and the MRTB fast-track UK-trained professionalsTheir first year running a business: shareholder agreements, doing your own books, and why the first two to three years are the hardest"It's never forever." What waving goodbye at Heathrow actually felt like, and why the move back is always an option If you're a healthcare professional who loves the job but not the system, this one shows you what's on the other side of the paperwork. Follow Rebecca, James and Milford Specialist Recruitment here MSR: http://milfordspecialistrecruitment.com Rebecca: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-milford-2950b6132/ James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamilford/ Follow David / Via Nova here David's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbirchmore/ Are you ready to leave healthcare? Still in a role you've mentally already left? Answer 15 questions and find out exactly where you stand, and what to do first. Take the free 2 min quiz here: https://david-a0a3cnqe.scoreapp.com/

  4. 7 Jul

    S2:E2 | Leaving a 15-year radiotherapy career to build a postpartum app | Pooja Patel, Naani

    You can be good at the job, respected, 15 years in, and still know it's time to do something else. That's where Pooja Patel found herself. Pooja spent 15 years as a radiotherapy radiographer across London and Buckinghamshire. After her son was born, she hung up her radiotherapy hat and started building Naani, a postpartum support app for mothers, recorded in her own voice. She talks to host David Birchmore about the fear of leaving, the skills she didn't know she had, and what it takes to start something when you don't know everything yet. This one's for any healthcare professional who's started to wonder whether they want another decade of the same. In this episode: Why 15 years in radiotherapy became part of her identity, and how she started to separate the twoThe middle-of-the-night moment with her son that became the idea for NaaniThe fear that she had no transferable skills outside the clinic, and why that was wrongAttention to detail, calm under pressure, communication: healthcare skills that carry straight into businessGetting out of her own way, and moving the needle 1% a day instead of waiting for perfectComing home with nothing left to give her own family after giving all day at workThe financial reality of leaving a salary while the app makes no money yetThe sacrifice her husband makes so she can do the pickups and drop-offs, and why that side goes unspokenUsing her own voice on the app instead of handing it to AIIdentity, cultural expectations, and self-worth beyond a job titleHer advice for anyone in a healthcare role thinking "I want out" Have a listen, then go and find Naani. Follow Pooja: Website: https://meetnaani.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pooja-patel-927239184/ Instagram: Meet.naani Follow David / Via Nova here: David's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbirchmore/ Are you ready to leave healthcare? Still in a role you've mentally already left? Answer 15 questions and find out exactly where you stand, and what to do first. Take the free 2 min quiz here: https://david-a0a3cnqe.scoreapp.com/ Get A Shift On is sponsored by Clockwork CRM. Built in Britain, one system for your contacts, sales, projects and email, with real people on support. If you're building a business, get the admin in one place from day one. Free 14-day trial, no card needed: https://clockworkcrm.com/get-started

  5. 3 Jul

    S2:E1 | Leaving The NHS, Losing The Job Title: From Nurse & Podiatrist To TEDx Speaker | Dave James

    Dave James drove the same number plate across three different cars. It ended in TOE. That's how deep the podiatrist identity went, until the day he decided the job was one of the things he did, not who he was. Dave spent three years as an A&E nurse in Oxford before retraining as a podiatrist. He went from newly qualified to band seven team leader in 20 months, ran his own clinical practice for eight years, co-founded a foot health charity, and sold up at the start of 2019. He's now a speaker coach, professional host and stand-up. His TEDx talk on men, mindfulness and meditation was chosen as an Editor's Pick and has been watched over 22,000 times. If you're a healthcare professional weighing up a career change, this conversation with host David Birchmore covers the bits people avoid: what your clinical years actually trained you for, why the qualifications on your wall matter less than you think, and the guilt that follows you out of the building. In this episode: The four-hour rule in A&E and the rapport skill it built without anyone ever naming itThe TOE number plate, and the moment Dave stopped identifying as a podiatristThe professionalism paradox: professionalism, patient, personality, and why the professional bodies flip the pyramidHis "wall of academic wankery", and where those certificates are nowNobody asked about his degree classification. Not once, in an entire careerThe NHS promotion problem: brilliant clinicians made managers with no training for itGoodwill as the glue of the NHS, and what happens when management pushes it too farThe selfless-to-selfish continuum, and why healthcare professionals have almost no self-care space between the twoSelling a clinical practice he built from scratch, then coaching with no formal qualificationStanding on the red dot at TEDx Tamworth as their first ever speakerTelling the truth of your reality, and what happened when Dave first spoke publicly about angerThe first thing to stop doing if you're building something on the side and feel like a fraud Listen now and work out what your clinical career has actually been training you for. Follow Dave James: Website: www.davethecoach.co.uk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdavejames/ Follow David / Via Nova here: David's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbirchmore/ Are you ready to leave healthcare? Still in a role you've mentally already left? Answer 15 questions and find out exactly where you stand, and what to do first. Take the free 2 min quiz here - https://david-a0a3cnqe.scoreapp.com/ Get A Shift On is sponsored by Clockwork CRM. Built in Britain, one system for your contacts, sales, projects and email, with real people on support. If you're building a business, get the admin in one place from day one. Free 14-day trial, no card needed: https://clockworkcrm.com/get-started?utm_source=vianova&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=sponsorship-2026

  • 5 Episodes

About

Get A Shift On is a podcast for healthcare professionals who've started thinking "I want out." Real stories from people who left and built something else. You're good at the job. That was never the question. The real question is whether you can keep doing it for another 10 or 15 years, and what it costs your health, your family and your sanity if you stay. Host David Birchmore spent over 25 years in and around healthcare, as a radiographer, managing clinical systems, and in international medical technology and business development, before leaving to build his own business. He coaches healthcare professionals through career change, and he talks to people who've already made it: radiographers, AHPs, nurses, doctors, managers and operational leads who walked away from the healthcare system and took a different path. Walking away from a stable system with a family depending on you is a hard choice. Staying often feels worse. Every episode gets into what that decision actually involves: The commercial worth of your clinical experience, and the transferable skills you don't know you haveThe money question, the real financial numbers, minimum viable income, and how close the fear turns out to be to realityPortfolio careers, and building a business as a clinicianNHS redundancy, and leaving the NHS on your own termsThe identity side nobody warns you about, the bit where you stop being "the radiographer" and work out who you are instead Honest conversations about leaving healthcare and what comes after. For experienced healthcare professionals who've mentally already left, and want to know what to do first. New stories every episode, out weekly.

Information

  • Creator
    David Birchmore
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 David Birchmore
  • Show Website
    Get A Shift On