When Phoebe and I first started talking about building Go Locum, one of the key principles we agreed on was that most healthcare workers deserve a better say in when and where they work.
This principle of worker autonomy is weaved into virtually every business decision we have made since then, and there’s no better example of this than our widespread use of the “work flexibly” catchphrase, which is plastered across our t-shirts, mugs and website alike.
We’ve made substantial progress towards this with the tools that we’ve built and the hospital departments we work with, but unfortunately there is still work to be done.
As a result, there are some situations where we aren’t able to offer as much flexibility as we would like to just yet, and this article is intended to help candidates who work with us navigate these scenarios effectively.
The first of these situations is when a worker applies for a vacancy but is only available for a portion of the advertised dates.
As a general rule, hospitals will almost exclusively offer locum roles to candidates who can work all of the dates rather than a combination of candidates who can each cover part of the vacancy.
This is because onboarding more people is generally far more work, and introduces risks for continuity of care. It’s also less cost-effective when subsided travel and accommodation are involved.
In these circumstances, your likelihood of getting a locum job depends far more on your availability than the accolades on your CV (as long as you are sufficiently qualified for the role, of course).
Hospitals will normally only resort to partial dates when there are no applicants who are available for the whole period. This is far more common for more experienced clinicians in niche areas of demand than it is for junior clinicians. It’s also highly dependent on market factors such as how many workers want the type of work being advertised, and the time of year.
Hospitals will also take a much longer time to respond to your application, as they will often wait and see if a subsequent applicant can work the whole period.
The has the following side-effects for workers applying to locum roles with partial availability:
- Your likelihood for being offered a given locum role goes down significantly.
- The smaller the window of shifts you want to work in a given vacancy, the less likely you are to be offered the role.
- You may have to be prepared to apply to 5-10 vacancies to get 1 job, knowing that most of your applications will be unsuccessful.
- You have less leverage in wage negotiations when applying for partial dates.
- Given the delays in hospitals responding to these applications, you will also have to be prepared to change your plans at short notice to make this work.
The second situation that can be challenging for us is with candidates who want very short runs of locum work.
For the purposes of this article, “short runs of locum work” generally means anything less than a 10-12 week term, but especially applies to people who are looking for only one or two week stints at a time.
Given that Go Locum is something of a half-way house for people who want to live and work flexibly, we get a lot of candidates who want “1 week on 3 week off” arrangements, or similar.
As you’re likely aware, most hospital rosters operate on a 3-4 month rotating term basis. The vast majority of the time, the first preference for hospital administrations would be for all of their staff to fit cleanly into these term rotations.
Naturally in practice, real life gets in the way and as a result of workforce attrition, annual leave, maternity leave, professional exams and so on, shorter vacancies do still pop up.
But the key issue is that these vacancies are highly random in nature, and can materialise at short notice. There will be periods with multiple simultaneous vacancies, and periods with almost none.
The vacancies that arise from these types of leave tend also to be from a reduced selection of specialties and locations, often having a predilection for emergency medicine, gen med, out-of-hours work, nights, and/or work in regional areas and beyond.
This has the following consequences for workers who want very short runs of work:
- Due to the random nature of short-term vacancies, it can be very hard to get a regular cadence (ie 1 week on 3 weeks off each and every month). In general, we encourage applicants to be open to analogous arrangements such as 3 weeks on, 3 months off (or better yet, 1 term on, 1 term off) which is often more feasible.
- Because vacancies of this duration are often advertised at short notice, you will need to be prepared to tolerate uncertainty in your working life, and likely change your plans at short notice to make it work.
- Just like with partial dates applications, applications to short runs of locum work can also have a lower success rate, as hospitals generally prefer to give them to candidates who have worked at the hospital before. As a result, workers will need to be prepared to make multiple job applications for different vacancies, knowing that some of them will be unsuccessful.
- Applicants to short runs of work will typically have a narrower range of specialties and locations to choose from.
It’s worth mentioning here that for some people who want a high degree of flexibility and/or short runs of work on a regular cadence, that a permanent part-time role at a hospital you already have a relationship with may be a better fit than a “locum year” in the traditional sense. This is particularly true for people who will need concrete plans in advance around family commitments, for example, but naturally typically comes at the expense of a lower pay rate.
Despite the macabre tone of this article, I just want to make it really clear that we understand and empathise with your desires for flexible work. It’s why we started this company. We’ll also never stop looking for the right locum for you - even if it is difficult to find them, in some circumstances.
At Go Locum we believe that through continued innovation we can change the way this industry functions to enable more flexibility for everyone. Every day Phoebe and I are building new systems and pathways to build a society that gives autonomy to health workers in Australia. But until that time, there are some hard market realities we have to face together, and it’s important that you understand these issues to help inform your work preferences moving forward.
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Locum doctor, founder of Go Locum and labradoodle enthusiast