Hi, I'm Christina Adams, MD

Medicine

I am a board-certified OB-GYN who has been working in full scope practice since finishing residency in 2006.

After medical school at the University of Miami, I trained at the University of Florida Health Science Center in Jacksonville, FL, and stayed on as faculty for the first 5 years of my career in a hybrid community and academic practice. I then transitioned to private OB/GYN practice in the Jacksonville, FL area where I’ve been since.

I provided full scope OBGYN care for 18 years and recently transitioned to a hospitalist role. 

Family

My husband Mike and I have been married since 2003. He previously worked as a CPA when we were married and for the first few years after we had our boys. We tried daycare, and then had a great nanny, but eventually the juggling act between our two careers became overwhelming and we realized we were outsourcing the raising of our children - and that didn’t work for us. So, Mike has been a stay-at-home dad for the last 10 years, taking care of our 2 boys, driving the kid carpool and keeping things running at home while I go to work.

Leadership / Organized Medicine

I firmly believe as physicians we are either at the table or we are on the menu. So, during the last 8-10 years, I have also put my passion for physician wellbeing into action by getting involved in various ACOG committees and positions. I have leadership and legislative advocacy experience with ACOG District XII (Florida).

I’ve been a delegate for our Florida ACOG district to the Florida Medical Association (FMA) house of delegates since 2017. I did their Leadership Academy from 2018-2019 and have served on reference committees several years since. I’m currently serving on a Women in Medicine committee for the FMA.

Prior to becoming a hospitalist, I served on the board of my large single specialty group, Women’s Care, and was a regional medical director for Women’s Care in Jacksonville for 4 years before that.

Coaching

So why, with all this other stuff going on in my life, did I decide to train to be a physician coach?

Because physician burnout is a crisis for physicians in this country. We have been trained in a culture where we put our heads down and power through. We ignore our basic human needs (sleep, food, going to the bathroom) to provide care to our patients. We don’t feel we have agency to change anything about what makes us unhappy in our jobs. We live in crisis mode and don’t see a way out of it that doesn’t involve leaving medicine.

But we need doctors. We need to keep doctors in medicine - practicing medicine, providing care to patients in a way that is SUSTAINABLE. Coaching helps us make medicine more sustainable.

I see my path forward in medicine as a three-pronged approach, because all three prongs are important to me and to my colleagues and patients.

1. Clinical medicine: I want to continue to work clinically. I love what I do – I don’t want to give it up. I thought about getting an MBA and moving into the business side of medicine but decided that wasn’t the path for me.
2. Legislative advocacy: Organized medicine is a way for physicians to leverage our collective voices to advocate for our profession. That’s why I do what I do with ACOG and our state medical society.
3. Coaching: Physician coaching is an evidence-based intervention to decrease burnout and emotional exhaustion, increase physician satisfaction and engagement, and improve physician quality of life. We all have the same struggles. We need to engage in physician communities where we share strategies to keep doing the work while setting boundaries and crafting our own paths forward in medicine. I became a coach to create a community to help women physicians do just that.