The Good and Bad Side of Locums with a Family

Many physicians, especially those who are fresh graduates or in their residency, are motivated to reframe their practice and turn to locum tenens as part-time or full-time careers. In the center, however, there is a wide void with physicians with families.

Most of these doctors will instantly feel why they couldn't deal with locums. Locums allow a personalized lifestyle that they can find beneficial. However, working and traveling with your family when you have a locum assignment might be good or bad. Let's see the good and bad side of being a locum with families.

The Good Side

Reclaiming your time

The greatest advantages of locum tenens practice are born out of the opportunity to handle your own time. Your year is set up ahead of time on a wide scale by picking the tasks that suit your wishes. The month has a fixed calendar, and as you have agreed precisely what you want, the hours in a day are under your power.

In the path to happiness, versatility in all areas of practice is a strong instrument, and it is immensely important to manage your time and resources. It boils down to working your hours and only spending uninterrupted time with your family when it comes to locum tenens working with a family.

Doing this allows you the opportunity to be present with your spouse and children and to leave others with the headaches of documentation and management of a practice. Using locum tenens work will help you to regain and redirect your time and energy to your family.

Decreased Stress

When was the last time you learned the administrator of your hospital put your wellbeing on a metric they needed to concentrate on? In medicine, tension is strong at all times, and the causes have changed. Emotional fatigue, a sense of ineffectiveness, and a lack of meaning in work were reported by over 50% of physicians.

As physicians, we have the most sophisticated resources to care for our patients. We have access to more data than ever before, so why do almost 40 percent of doctors experience fatigue and depression feelings?

It's the increasing stack of administrative paperwork, the ongoing meetings on quotas and metrics with middle management, and the distancing of our jobs from what we signed up for; patient care. Locum tenens allows you to determine where you exercise in a week or month and the hours you work, but even more importantly, it allows you to define what you are going to do in your shifts.

Personal Finance

Locum tenens will allow you to sock away cash and pay down med school debt early out of residency. When you save more of your income with your housing, travel, vehicle, and means covered or tax-deductible, a couple of years of locums will do wonders to debt.

Locums may be the trick you need for those who are already employed and looking to change the course of your life towards true financial independence. Locums work also pays better than peers hired by the private practice or hospital and lowers expenses.

What is this going to mean to you? It equates to paying down debt and raising your net worth to a greater chunk of your hard-earned money. We think this reset always gives doctors back their freedom, their major leap, but there are substantial rewards at the bottom.

Travel for fun, family, or special events

Part-time locum tenens employment, on a simpler level, enables doctors to take advantage of long stays in places in which they will need to be for family-oriented purposes. We notice that practitioners who use part-time locations that are "family-friendly" will pick assignments in areas where they have wanted to visit for fun, where they have a family, or where there is a special event.

It can also mean having the spouse and kids with you in suitable places for long stays and offers a way to immerse yourself in other areas that you can visit for a limited time only.

The Bad Side

School-Aged Children

Full-time locums need some planning for kids in school. Let's be truthful, even if it's possible, transferring your 10-year-old from one elementary school to the next is both detrimental to their education and not fair to their social growth. This is a strong drawback for places with children. For doctors, in this case, we don't have a simple response.

You have to look closely at your family and their needs, especially if there are specific requirements for one of your dependents. 

Living Arrangements

The average assignment of locum tenens would position you in an extended stay hotel that easily meets a newly minted residency graduate's requirements. However, it does not feel all that ideal when it comes to living with a partner and two children out of a single hotel room. Many local agencies would allow practitioners to make their own travel arrangements and refund the costs in response.

Spousal Occupation

For several doctors, one of the main obstacles to mid-career entry relates to their partner's career. If your husband or wife is a lawyer in a law firm, it might be a little difficult to move to different states every time. 

We have also noticed several cases where, regardless of what they do, the significant other is mobile for their career-this works well for graphic designers, salesmen, and other independent contractors. It won't fit in certain cases, that's easy. It would be prudent to determine your partners' job situation and their aspirations before even contemplating the work of locum tenens.

Travel with Kids

Just as the locum tenens assignment in Hawaii sounded great, it can be tough to get there with a family. For four weeks, packing for four people and then making it happen can be downright awful. Many agencies with locum tenens will bend over backward to help organize anything required for the trip and also have already staffed the hospital.

It can be extremely helpful to use the staffing agency for guidance on what each site needs, both inside and outside the hospital. How about planning? And what to pack? They are all very site-specific, but they are specific to your family, most importantly. Note, where you stay, you will probably have water and a dryer, a grocery store near you, and the place you choose can be built to have facilities to make the change simple.

Overall, with locum tenens, assignments with your family become enjoyable and exciting as you get more relaxed. You learn to choose assignments that provide you and your family with educational and cultural development.

On your journey, other like-minded physicians and their families become your new friends. You concentrate on health treatment, alleviate tension, save more, and set a fresh lifestyle in motion that begins to feel like you thought it would. We're not saying it's ideal for all families, but we're hoping we can keep shining some light on it.

Louie is the father behind the travel blog Browseeverywhere.com. He has a background in photography, E-commerce, and writing product reviews online at ConsumerReviews24. Traveling full time with his family was his ultimate past-time. If he’s not typing at his laptop, you can probably find him watching movies.