Changes in the Australian medical workforce landscape have made finding locum work more competitive than ever before, especially for junior staff. In difficult market conditions it’s worth considering all the different ways you can increase your employability and one of the easiest ways to increase your bookings is to get invited back to a role you’ve worked in previously.
Return locums are also an attractive option for hospital administrators due to less admin workload, and the locum’s prior success in the role provides assurances about their ability to deliver the necessary clinical skills. As a result, return locums who apply for a vacancy will almost always get preferential treatment over someone who’s never worked there before, all else being equal.
While your agent can and should be doing a lot of relationship-building on your behalf (it’s their job after all), if you leave it exclusively to them, you will unfortunately leave a lot of locum work opportunities on the table. Even if they are the best agent in the world there are things they simply can’t achieve on your behalf - things like establishing relationships in-person with other staff on your ward, and delivering an excellent clinical experience, and so on.
With that in mind, here’s a collection of things I’ve learned about getting invited back to a role you’ve already worked in based on my experience with Go Locum and also as a locum doctor myself.
Meet the workforce team in person
The overarching theme in this article is to establish and grow relationships within hospitals you want to work regularly in, and there’s no better way to initiate that than to meet the workforce administrators in person. At some smaller hospitals, the most relevant on-site person may be the head of department or nurse unit manager, but at a medium-sized or larger hospital, typically there will be a dedicated workforce admin team.
In the digital age, lots of behind-the-scenes organisation happens via email and phone, and a nice way to stand out and “put a face to the name” so to speak is to get in front of the people you’ve been chatting to while organising your locum. This might include a quick hello on your first day, or a thank you on the way out, or both. You don’t necessarily need a specific agenda for this sort of meeting either, as if you’re friendly and polite about it, they will likely appreciate it and are more likely to remember you than any other faceless locum.
Tell the hospital you’re open to working there regularly
This one might sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget. In practice, most hospital administrators will try a range of things to fill a roster vacancy before they speak to an agent about it. This would typically include trying to fill it with one of their permanent staff members, reaching into their casual pool staff, or even contacting a select group of preferred locums before they advertise it more broadly. This helps them exert some quality control on the staff they bring into their health services. If you tell the administrators that you’re open to more work they’re more likely to offer it to you.
This goes for contract extensions as well. If you indicate that you’re open to an extension directly with the people responsible making that decision internally, you’re more than halfway there to getting it offered to you.
Build mutual trust with your peers
Another critical piece of the puzzle is to ensure that you have mutual respect with the staff you work alongside clinically. This includes other doctors, nurses, clinical administrators and allied health staff. Introducing yourself to the head of the unit when you start working there also goes a long way towards establishing a good relationship.
Locums should also acknowledge the disparity between permanent and temporary staff. My personal view is that if anyone is getting a longer lunch break, knocking off early, or going to a teaching session, it should be a permanent staff member. And if anyone is going to be seeing an extra patient or two, it should be the locum.
This also extends to cherry-picking low complexity tasks or patients. In general you should aim to have little to no idle time. If you have spare capacity, be sure to offer this to your colleagues in the form of a helping hand, which will always be appreciated and rarely particularly arduous, in my experience.
While you may get away with cherry-picking behaviour in the short-term, in the long-term you’ll develop a reputation that will find its way back to the relevant decision-makers, and I’ve personally seen this happen on numerous occasions.
Make it easy as possible for them to work with you
This is another one that probably seems straightforward, but is easy to overlook. If you want to get invited back you should make all reasonable efforts to make their work with you as easy as possible. This includes being punctual, reliable and consistent. Cancelling shifts at short notice or on a repeated basis are pet peeves and will significantly hurt your reputation.
Respond with any credentials the administration asks for as soon as is feasible for you. You should also arrive early on your first day to allow extra time to achieve swipe card and IT access and so on, to ensure your clinical duties are not significantly impacted by your onboarding.
This also extends to being flexible with your placement details. This might include doing a slightly different shift than originally planned or being assigned to a different team. Of course, this is a slippery slope that can get out of control, and certainly shouldn’t extend to doing things outside your scope or repeatedly getting surprised with spontaneous night shifts. But this should be balanced with recognition that the role of locums in the system is to dynamically respond to changes in workforce needs, and locums who understand this are more employable than those who don’t.
Look for ways to make booking you more affordable
There’s been quite a big push to reduce contingent workforce costs over the last two years, and some of the areas under scrutiny are travel and accommodation costs. Realistically, most hospital services want to employ low cost options most of the time, except in the most urgent circumstances. As a result of this, having alternative low-cost accommodation arrangements such as with nearby family or by choosing modest commercial options will also significantly increase your re-employability.
From a travel perspective, most hospitals won’t want to be repeatedly flying staff in from interstate unless you are at the specialist level or their geographic location mandates it. Therefore for best results, it’s smart to target employers that are close to your home, or at least, ones you can drive to quite easily.
Leave the department in a better state than when you found it
Locums in general have a reputation for swanning in and out of the workplace with no regard for the long-term function of the health service. For many, this is actually a significant appeal to this brand of employment. If you hope to become a regular locum at a site, it’s important to change this mindset.
Consider making suggestions for improvements and/or having discussions with team members about policies or procedures that can be improved. Another option is to take on projects like editing old locum handover documents or onboarding materials, doing clinical audits, or chairing morbidity and mortality meetings. These have a secondary benefit of being claimable for your CPD as well.
I’m aware of at least one locum who became invaluable to a department by making significant contributions to roster planning, running the morning medical handover meetings and giving onboarding tours to new staff. They were almost functioning as an unofficial chief medical registrar. Because of this they were continuously employed for more than 12 months in a fairly lucrative locum position. Now while that’s not necessarily an appropriate use of public hospital resources nor is it likely consistently achievable, it does speak to how “extracurricular contributions” can make you a valued member of the team and therefore more re-employable.
Strike while the iron’s hot
If you do all of the above, there’s quite a high chance that you’ll start getting offered more shifts directly. It’s important to accept the shifts when they go out of their way to offer them to you individually, especially in the early days of growing the relationship. The aim is to become a person they can go to to reliably get their roster problems solved, and to begin with you have a certain degree of momentum that you can either take and run with by accepting the work. If you repeatedly decline their offers, you may find you fall off their radar quite quickly.
Importantly, I highly encourage everyone to close the loop with anyone who offers them shifts. This includes telling them promptly that you can or can’t do them - this indicates to them that you are reading their emails and value the information they’re sending you. Never ghost them or take a long time to get back to them, as this will discourage them from sending further messages to you.
Consider reaching out to your former supervisors periodically
If you feel you’ve developed a good relationship with the clinicians on your team, you can consider touching base with them occasionally to see if they have any roster vacancies you can take off their hands as their opinion will have significant weight with the workforce administration.
But proceed with caution - these clinicians are not your locum agent and will likely not appreciate repeated badgering for shifts. A balance between being helpful and annoying is essential for best results.
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Locum doctor, founder of Go Locum and labradoodle enthusiast