Running a GP practice can be very different from most other types of business in the sense that you are always, always busy. Someone who runs a restaurant, for example, might be sitting there on a wet and windy night as Storm Franklin blasts away outside, and perhaps only have a couple of customers in all evening. With a GP practice, you are never sitting there twiddling your thumbs. If anything, there are too many things to do.

This is one of the reasons why staff absence can be a really big issue, especially if it is one of your fellow GPs or a senior nurse for example. And yet, people in the medical profession are no different from anyone else in the sense that they can become ill or suffer injury in, say, a traffic accident, and thus be away from work.

If it is only a matter of a few days, you may be able to handle that in-house by having other team members work longer hours to cover for an absentee, but any longer than that and it can be a real headache. The only answer in this sort of situation is to hire a locum, but that can be expensive. According to a survey carried out by Medeconomics (which has now changed name to GP Business) in August 2020, GP locums in some areas today can cost as much as £1,000 a day.

That can make a considerable dent in the profits of your practice if you have someone off work for weeks on end. Not only that, but another survey found that today 20% of GPs are saying that locum GPs cover a quarter or more of the shifts in their practice. So that makes for a serious increase in the overheads of a practice.

Hiring A Locum Can Be A Necessity

But the simple fact is that you cannot continue to run your practice with staff members away, whatever the reason might be. So, hiring a locum when this happens is not so much a matter of choice as a necessity. Let’s face it: you have to take good care of your patients.

This is why you need GP locum insurance to cover the additional costs of hiring a locum when you need one. However, not all GP practices are the same, so you don’t want a policy that is “one size fits all” because it doesn’t.

For example, you might want a policy that kicks in from day one of one of your partner’s absences. On the other hand, you might be able to manage for a couple of weeks without a locum. In that case, you will want GP locum insurance that has a two-week deferment period. That will mean the premium is less than one that starts on day one.

At Approachable Locum Insurance we understand that not all practices are the same, and so we will tailor a policy to suit your exact requirements.