Locum and leave coverage
One word covering a sick day and a three-month gap
A locum booking can be a Tuesday or it can be a season, and past a certain length it stops being cover and starts being the job. Everything that matters about it follows from the shape.
Five bookings, one calendar
These are all called locum work and only two of them are really the same job.
The same twelve weeks
Week
30days booked
Somebody is coming back
The most common longer booking there is. You inherit a real caseload and a real recall list, and the person you are covering wants to return to a practice that still works. Leaving it in good order is most of the job.
Twelve weeks is a drawing, not a maximum. Bookings are whatever the practice needs and you agree to.
What changes once a booking is longer than a fortnight
This is the line most people underestimate, and it is the difference between a long temp shift and a locum post.
Their patients come with the chair
On a single day nobody expects continuity from you. Past about two weeks, patients start being yours: the ones part-way through a plan, the one who is anxious and had finally got used to somebody else, the recall that falls due while you are there.
Decisions stop being deferrable
On a short booking you can leave anything awkward for the person coming back. On a long one there is nobody to leave it for, and quietly parking things for three months is how a practice ends up worse than when you arrived.
The handover matters at both ends
Ask for a proper one going in, and leave a proper one going out. The person returning from leave should be able to pick up their list without reconstructing three months from the notes.
You become part of the team, briefly and genuinely
Long enough that people tell you things, invite you to lunch, and complain to you about the schedule. Most people find this is the part they end up liking.
Who this is for
- Dentists
- The largest part of locum work. Vacation, parental leave, illness, sabbatical, and cover while a practice recruits an associate. Engagements are quoted individually rather than from the published city rate card, because dentist arrangements are usually built around a daily figure or a share of production rather than an hourly rate.
- Registered dental hygienists
- Mostly parental leave cover and long-term absence, which tends to mean a full hygiene column handed to you for months rather than a day here and there.
- Dental assistants and chairside
- Blocks around leave, and standing weekly arrangements for practices whose staffing does not quite cover a particular day.
- Front office and office managers
- Interim cover during a gap, which is a real thing practices ask for and a genuinely different job from a day on reception.
The arrangement
Four things worth having settled before you accept
Travel and accommodation are agreed in advance
Some longer bookings, particularly in rural and remote areas, come with travel arrangements. Whatever is agreed is agreed before you accept, in writing, rather than discovered in week two.
We are your employer for the booking
A locum booking is a temporary placement. Payroll, source deductions and insurance sit with us, and covering three months does not create an employment relationship with the practice.
Registration and insurance are verified
Before you are scheduled, and kept current for the length of the booking, so an unfamiliar practice is not chasing paperwork on your first morning.
A long booking can become permanent, and only if you want it to
It happens often, particularly on cover-while-they-recruit bookings. Nothing obliges you and the decision is yours.
Tell us the shape you would take
Blocks, a standing day, or leave cover, and how far you will travel for one. Longer bookings are arranged rather than claimed, so it helps to know in advance who is open to them.