Why work as a Locum

Working as a pharmacy locum can offer flexibility and experience and the current opportunities are enormous. This article looks at how locums, and their employers, can get the best from the work they do Locum pharmacists are in great demand in both community and hospital pharmacy. There are several reasons for this. Community Pharmacies open for increasingly longer hours, and this means that two or more pharmacists are now required to cover the working week. In hospital pharmacy, too, the nine-to-five day has become a thing of the past, again with implications for staffing arrangements. To complicate matters further, both sectors are facing recruitment problems. Many pharmacy multiples find it hard to fill permanent pharmacist posts, and hospital recruitment suffers to some extent because salaries in community pharmacy &mdash at least for full-time posts &mdash tend to be higher. Finally, an increasing number of pharmacists are getting involved in providing additional pharmacy services (eg, medication review, domiciliary visits, services to nursing homes, etc), and in continuing professional development activities, all of which may take them away from the pharmacy and result in the need for locums. The opportunities for locuming are therefore enormous.