Working As A Locum GP: The Pros And Cons

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Working As A Locum GP The Pros And Cons
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03453503655
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If you are qualified as a GP, you may very well
wish to work as a locum rather than joining a
practice full time. There are several advantages
to working as a locum, not the least of which is
the money. Locum doctors are paid quite a bit
more than incumbent GPs and in general are better
paid than hospital locums. This is because
hospital locums are salaried and so they are paid
net of income tax and national insurance. As a
GP locum, you are self-employed and so to some
extent can dictate your own terms. Since you are
paid gross, there are a number of expenses for
which you can claim which a hospital locum cannot.
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These include things such as travel expenses,
running a car, telephone costs, stationery,
printing costs, accountants fees, and even
overnight stays, although the latter is often
paid for by the surgery for which you are working
if you have to live far away from home. If you
are single and enjoy visiting different parts of
the country, then working as a locum can be a
great alternative to working as a partner in a
practice, but it is not all pros. There are some
cons too, one of which is that there is no
guarantee of work. So, you could find that you
have no work for a couple of weeks. This is less
likely to occur if you work through an agency,
which will usually have plenty of jobs available.
Another thing is that as a GP locum you will have
to set up your own pension scheme, whereas
hospital locums have this built into their
salaries. Working as a locum in a hospital can
also incur some hostility from the incumbent
doctors, because you are being paid more than
they are for doing the same job. There sometimes
seems to be an attitude that since you are being
paid more you should be doing more. Locums are
also
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often stigmatised as second-class doctors,
without any particular responsibility. There can
also be an attitude that working for money as
opposed to working for the glory of the job is
somehow a form of heresy. There is also the
situation where patients may regard you as not
my real doctor and book in to see their own
doctor when he or she returns. Many Locums Are
Women Working Part-Time Many locums are women
who are working part-time because it fits in with
their lives. So, they can work perhaps two or
three full sessions a week and have three or four
days off to look after children, or whatever else
they need to do. Locum work is also flexible, and
it gives the participant the opportunity to see
many different aspects of medicine and general
practice without any long-term commitment.
However, there are other disadvantages of working
as a locum such as the fact that there is no paid
annual leave, no maternity benefits, no
postgraduate education allowance, and there is
also no continuity of patient care.
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Working as a locum also gives you the opportunity
to see how different practices work in clinical
and practice management. Since you are
self-employed when working as a locum, you really
do need to take out doctor locum insurance to
cover you in case you are sick and unable to work
for a long period. Of course, if you run a
general practice, you should also have doctor
locum insurance to cover the additional costs of
hiring a locum if you or one of your partners
goes sick and is off for any length of time. This
will cover the considerable extra costs of hiring
a locum as a stand-in, because in some areas the
daily costs of a locum are running at as high as
1,000 a day.
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