When you run an independent stand-alone medical practice, one of the things that you need to ensure is that you can always attend to your patients. That means that, from time to time, you will need to employ a locum to cover for absences of your partners or other senior staff in order to keep everything ticking over smoothly.
However, the problem of employing a locum is that they are not exactly cheap. Indeed, a survey of GP locum earnings taken in August 2020 by Medeconomics found that in some areas of the UK the cost of GP locums is as much as £1,000 a day. That is a lot of money even if you only need cover for a couple of weeks, but if you have a partner who is off work for six or eight weeks it adds up to a considerable dent in the overall income of your practice for the year.
One of the problems is that unexpected absences are just that – unexpected. There is no way that you can plan ahead and juggle things round to cover for a missing colleague. You need to hire a locum, and often at very short notice. This is why it makes a lot of sense to invest in doctors locum insurance in order to cover the huge extra costs of these times.
Absences can be caused by a number of different things in addition to sickness. For instance, a partner may get called up for jury service. In this case there is no telling how long he or she may be away from the surgery. The case may go on for a week. On the other hand, it could go on for months. There is just no way of knowing.
Other issues can be things like delayed return from holiday for a doctor or senior practitioner, a practice manager, physiotherapist, and so on. We have had examples of this only very recently with countries that were on an amber list or green list suddenly being switched to a red list, and it is likely that this could go on for some time with the way that the pandemic is going up and down in countries around the world.
You could have someone off on maternity leave in which case you could need a locum for up to a year, maternity leave being made up of 26 weeks of ordinary maternity leave and 26 weeks of additional maternity leave. Fair enough, not all new mothers take the total of 52 weeks, in part because statutory maternity pay only lasts for 39 weeks. Then you could have someone off on paternity leave also.
Locum insurance policies can cover a range of different types of absence, and most of them are unavoidable. It is vital for your business that you protect your practice and your patients, and a locum is the only way to do this in most instances.
When considering a locum insurance policy for doctors’ surgeries, it is necessary to consider how your practice can cope with staff absences. For example, if you can have people work for longer hours for a couple of weeks, then you may not need your locum insurance to kick in until after that point, and this will have the effect of reducing the premium compared with requiring it to begin immediately.
At Approachable Locum Insurance, we can provide the cover that you need that can be tailored to your precise requirements. As an independent medical practice insurance provider, we understand the insurance market and we can pinpoint the right cover for your individual circumstances. No two practices are going to be exactly the same, and so it is necessary to ensure that you only pay for the cover that you require.
We will sit down with you and listen to your situation, and then we can guide you in the right direction. In fact, we can provide you with an initial quote within a few minutes, but then this will need to be refined so that it covers exactly what you need. We can talk through the details with you and ensure that it covers all of the individuals that you need cover for and produce the perfect policy for you.
