Leave and locum coverage
You have known about this absence for four months. Use them.
Maternity leave, extended illness, sabbatical, or the gap while you recruit. Long absences are the one staffing problem you can see coming, and almost the only one where being early changes the answer.
Anybody can send you twelve temps
The thing worth arranging is that it is the same one. Switch between the two and look at what each Monday costs.
Twelve weeks of somebody’s leave
Who is standing in the column
8
Different people in the column
Eight first days
- Somebody walks the new person through the software, again
- The patients part-way through a plan meet a stranger, again
- The recall list is nobody's job for twelve weeks
- Your team spends every Monday orienting somebody
- Nothing that needed a decision gets one, because nobody is there long enough to make it
Whether one professional can cover a whole absence depends on its length, the role, and who is available in your market. It is worth asking as early as you know the dates rather than assuming either way.
Five absences, and they are not the same problem
- Maternity and parental leave
- The longest and most predictable absence a practice plans for, and the one where continuity matters most. You know the dates months ahead, which is exactly the position from which cover is easiest to arrange well.
- Extended illness or surgery
- Less predictable, often open-ended, and frequently arranged in stages as the picture becomes clearer. We would rather book a month and extend it than pretend anybody knows the end date on week one.
- Vacation and sabbatical
- A week or a season. Short enough that a single professional usually covers the whole thing, and the handover is a conversation rather than a document.
- The gap while you recruit
- Somebody has resigned and the search will take as long as it takes. This is cover for a position that is genuinely open rather than one somebody is coming back to, which changes what you want from the person filling it.
- A standing weekly arrangement
- Not an absence at all. A practice that needs Wednesdays covered indefinitely but cannot justify hiring for one day. Somebody who has worked it before sees each date first, and enough of them tend to stick that the column settles, but a standing booking is a series of shifts rather than one commitment.
Four things that make long cover work
None of them are difficult. All of them are much easier four months out than four weeks out.
Which markets we cover- Tell us as soon as you know the dates
- Not when the leave starts, and not a fortnight before. The pool of professionals who can commit to a long block is smaller than the pool who can take a Tuesday, and it is best approached with time in hand.
- Decide what the cover is actually for
- Holding a column steady until somebody returns is a different job from carrying a practice through a gap while you hire. Say which one it is, because the right person differs.
- Be honest about the awkward parts
- The equipment that is temperamental, the patient who is difficult, the fact that the person on leave ran the recall list personally. Somebody walking into that unprepared is how a long booking ends early.
- Plan the handover at both ends
- Going in and coming out. The person returning from leave should be able to pick up their own list without reconstructing three months from the notes, and that only happens if somebody asked for it in advance.
The arrangement
A three-month booking is still a temporary placement
Which is the point of doing it this way. However long the cover runs, the professional is our employee rather than yours, so a long absence does not quietly turn into an employment relationship your practice did not intend to create.
If a long booking does turn into a permanent hire, and it sometimes does, a placement fee applies at that point and is quoted before anything is agreed.
- One professional across the absence wherever it can be arranged
- Registration and insurance verified before they start and kept current
- We are the employer throughout, however long the booking runs
- Payroll, source deductions, remittances and insurance sit with us
- A long booking does not create an employment relationship with your practice
Locum dentists
Covering an associate is its own thing. Dentists are not on the published city rate card, because dentist engagements are usually built around a daily figure or a share of production rather than an hourly rate, so a locum dentist booking is quoted individually rather than looked up.
We also place associates permanently, and a locum period before a permanent offer is one of the more sensible ways to make that decision, for both of you.
Send us the dates, even the vague ones
Which role, roughly when, and roughly how long. We will tell you honestly what cover looks like in your area and whether one person across the whole thing is realistic.