Forget about the NHS 10 Year Health Plan for a moment, and instead how about hearing some reflections from a 10 year relationship anniversary with a practice I regularly work for in a locum capacity?
I started off my GP career as a salaried GP, but after relocating down to the South Coast, I decided to locum to get a feel for the local area before jumping in with both feet.
Initially, I was put in touch with the senior partner of this practice through a mutual friend, and almost instantly he invited me to pop into the surgery to meet the team. After a quick coffee and chat, which was essentially a mutual evaluation, they booked me in for a couple of locum shifts. It was their practice policy to cover each GP’s annual leave with a locum, rather than struggling internally to manage the workload, and I was told that each partner was happy to sacrifice some of their drawings for the sake of their wellbeing, and that of their employed GPs whom they wanted to look after. That all sounded very promising to me.
Ten years later, and I still regularly locum for this practice. So how has the relationship evolved over this period?
I have been asked by them twice if I’d like to become an employed GP at the practice, but each time I’ve had to unfortunately turn them down. Life has moved on since those early days of locuming in order to ‘get a feel’ for local practices and I now do it mainly for the flexibility it affords me around my other roles and my young family.
I like to think I’ve contributed more than perhaps some practices view the potential total contribution of a locum – I’ve done an audit, I attend their MDT meetings, I’ve participated actively in complaints that have named me, I’m happy to take queries from the manager about contract issues with my LMC hat on, and I often get asked questions about the national medico-political direction with my BMA hat on. From a clinical point of view, after 10 years it’s inevitable that there’s some continuity with the patients, some of whom will ‘wait’ to see me, I’m more than happy to file my own results if I’m around frequently enough, and I contributed to script signing to support their dispensary team in the days of paper prescriptions.
In return, as well as offering me permanent work, there’s a lot that the practice has done for me. I’m invited to their social gatherings and Christmas parties, they’ve accommodated me having to pop out to collect a sick child, and I’ve even got personal support from them when I was going through a difficult time. Ultimately, I’ve become lifelong friends with the doctors and some of their staff – I know I can go to them if I need their support, and I hope the feeling is reciprocal.
In summary, I’ve got far more out of this than I ever imagined when I first dropped in for that coffee, and I hope this inspires sessional colleagues and practices alike to start out on a 10 year plan of their own to build a mutually beneficial relationship.
Dr Clare Sieber is the National Association of Sessional GPs’s sessional GP workforce advocate.
