Being a locum pharmacist in the UK is a pretty good job. According to Chemist & Druggist, UK-based locum pharmacists earned £22.34 per hour on average in 2020 (https://www.chemistanddruggist.co.uk/). That is near enough £900 a week for a five-day week, or about £47,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it.
However, it is not nearly so nice if you have to pay for it! If you don’t happen to be Boots, but you run a local pharmacy, you still need to be able to serve your customers at all times, no matter what. That means that when your pharmacists go on holiday or go sick, you have to have a stand-in to cover for them, and that means a locum.
When you are an employer, you employ other people (obviously) and unfortunately, people can go sick. They also take holidays. They may have to take time off work urgently to attend to family matters and need compassionate leave, or they may need to go on a training course for a week. They might get called up for jury service – and who knows how long that could go on? A trial might be over in a week. Equally, it could go on for months! There is no way of knowing.
A male pharmacist could need some time off for paternity leave. He or she could get caught up overseas having been for a holiday to a green list country that BoJo and his pals have suddenly decided to change to amber and that unexpectedly requires them to hibernate for 10 days, even if they can get back to the UK.
The possibilities are almost endless because however skilled a pharmacist maybe, at the end of the day they are only people, and people can suffer from all sorts of unexpected issues. The result is that, as the business owner, you have to obtain a locum at short notice. While it may be urgent for you, the locum has to some extent got you over a barrel because you need the locum just as much as, if not more, than he or she needs you. Fair enough, there is a limit, but nonetheless, you are going to have to pay a locum a lot more than your regular pharmacist, even if only for a relatively short time.
Fortunately, there is a way to deal with this and it is called pharmacist locum insurance. Simply put, it covers you for the greatly increased cost of hiring a locum in any sort of emergency.
This is what we can provide you with at Approachable Locum Insurance. We can provide you with insurance cover to offset the cost of hiring a locum pharmacist with a policy that we can tailor to your precise needs. For example, your locum insurance can cover time off for paternity leave, but if your pharmacist is aged 62 with a wife of similar age, you are almost certainly not going to need cover for that situation. With our pharmacist locum insurance, that can be written out of your policy and thus reduce the premium.
Your policy also comes with only a 12-month pre-existing condition clause compared with a 24-month or even 36-month clause in most locum policies. There is also a continuation option which means that the policy cannot be cancelled, pay-out reduced, or simply refused for a particular individual in the event of health issues when up for renewal.
There are several options available with our locum insurance, so talk to one of our expert advisers who can help to guide you.
