Great locums are rarely short of opportunities as locuming is fast becoming a specialist skill. To be able to enter a practice you’ve never been to before, see unknown patients and leave with them and practice staff content, is a challenge that often goes unnoticed. For those who enjoy a challenge, being a locum offers a satisfying and varied working life.
It can be a thankless task. Locums don’t experience the rewards of long-term general practice or develop long-lasting relationships with GPs or patients. And patients rarely ask specifically to see a locum GP.
Seeing a locum can offer patients a fresh view to an old problem and might even spot a previous misdiagnosis. There is also the opportunity for changing the culture of a practice, perhaps with the overuse of antibiotics for example or a system that’s badly organised.
There are definite advantages to not being tied to a practice. You can always choose to walk away from a bad practice and never work there again for example. Managing a 21st century practice is a tough job, but it’s one that locums don’t need to worry about which lets them focus on patient care much more.
Being your own boss has many freedoms too, such as not having to negotiate holiday with other colleagues and devoting more time to patient care while working around your responsibilities as a parent for example. For GP Locum Jobs, contact the http://www.thegplocumagency.co.uk/ today.
Being a locum also gives you the freedom to follow other interests. You could work 3 days a week and do something completely different for the other 2. You could drop everything to work for Medecins Sans Frontieres for 6 months every year. Any of these things becomes possible when you have no partners to negotiate with.
You might well be a locum currently because there are no other opportunities but make the most of the experience and don’t feel jealous of friends who walked right into a partnership. They have missed the chance to broaden their experience. As a locum, you can work in inner city practices and then see how a rural surgery operates. You can experience large and small practices, those with affluent patients and those designed for the homeless.
You get to experience using different software and different methods of recording consultations. All of this will make you a far more rounded GP, if you have experienced both problems faced by the poor and the illnesses of the rich. Whichever one inspires you more, you can focus on this field in the future.
For practices short of staff, good locums are a life-saver. You can get great job satisfaction from knowing how needed you are and being welcomed into a busy practice with a doctor off-sick and a room full of patients is a good start. When you leave to a chorus of thanks, you know how good it feels to be needed.
