When you run a pharmacy, you are in the front line, very often, as regards patients who have prescriptions from their doctor. They may go from one year to the next without seeing their doctor if they suffer from no fresh health issues, and with Covid-19 it means that many patients have not seen a doctor for two years or more, since most pharmacies now arrange to collect repeat prescriptions from the GP’s surgery in any case.

Not only are you the front line of the NHS in that sense, but you have to give advice to patients who present with minor health issues which can often be dealt with in the pharmacy and without the need to visit the doctor.

You also employ staff who are not qualified pharmacists but have sufficient training to be able to advise customers regarding the wide range of different products that you supply which can be anything from a suitable pain killer to sunburn lotion.

All of this means that if one of your pharmacy employees, or you as the pharmacist, go sick, you have problems. You still have to provide the same level of service to customers and to NHS patients, and private patients as well, and this can put an enormous amount of pressure on the other members of your team.

This means that you may need to hire a locum to cover for any absences, whether they are short-term or long-term. And locum pharmacists don’t come cheap, typically earning around £900 for a 40-hour week.

Investing in pharmacist locum insurance can help to take all these worries off your mind and keep your practice working at full throttle, whether you have people off sick, on holiday, or away from work for one of many other reasons, such as paternity leave, taking care of a sick relative, going on a training course, and more.

Furthermore, there are all sorts of situations that can arise, especially with Covid-19. Only very recently, we have seen Portugal taken off the green list of countries safe to visit and reduced to amber. That has meant that people who were on holiday there may have been unable to return home when expected or it may have meant that they were able to return home, having been negatively tested, but then had to self-isolate for ten days or for two weeks in a hotel. It all becomes very confusing, but it can mean that your practice has insufficient staff to cope and as a result, you need to take on a locum pharmacist at short notice and at a high cost in order to keep your practice running as it should.

Then there are other issues such as the possibility that a member of staff could be called up for jury service. That is a really difficult one, because who knows how long a trial may go on? If you are lucky, it might be over in a week. If you are not, it could go on for months. That means that you still have to cover that staff member’s absence, and in turn, that means that you need a locum because you cannot dismiss the staff member. Rather, you have to keep his or her position open to returning to after the trial is over. Locum insurance can cover you for these eventualities.

Certainly, it may never happen, but that is what insurance is for. To pay for unseen and unexpected things that may never happen but can be a huge worry when they do. And not just a huge worry, but an extremely costly one that can be devastating to your practice.

You might even think that you can afford to take the risk when it comes to locum insurance, and you might be right. But you also have to weigh up whether it is a risk worth taking.

At Approachable Locum Insurance, we can help you find the right policy for your particular needs. After all, no two pharmacies are the same, and you need the right cover for your individual requirements. You can trust us to make it easy to protect your practice and give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you are safe.