Read time: 2 minutes
Common misconceptions about locum tenens contract physicians:
– they are lazy
– they don’t want to work
– they are unsafe practitioners
– they are not good educators or role models for residents/trainees
Unfortunately, most of these misconceptions are perpetuated by a lack of understanding.
Senior clinicians are scared of what they don’t know. Just as lifetime academic medicine physicians have a sense of unease about their private practice peers, so might they all about independent contract physicians.
They all misunderstand the motivations to have a better schedule. They don’t understand what work-life balance actually is:
It is: ‘work less overall.’
Not: ‘don’t do your job.’
I know plenty of senior, experienced academic faculty who do the bare minimum each day, while leaving earlier than and pushing more work to their junior colleagues. You can’t build a cohesive, supportive work environment on the backs of the already overworked and lower compensated junior staff.
That’s a clear recipe for burnout.
Locum tenens physicians are capable and skilled.
If you aren’t, then you won’t survive joining a new practice environment with new workflows, equipment, and colleagues every few months to a few years. The inflexible and unsafe flounder.
The cream rises to the top – you must be fundamentally sound in your practice. There are no other metrics besides performance and patient safety. Especially since, as a non-employee, you have no recourse if the client wants you gone.
Here’s an example of the value and experience I was able to add from a thoracic surgery operating room:
The resident asks me to return to the OR making it clear it’s not an emergency.
I walked into the OR and immediately I can hear that the patient is tachycardic. The patient is young and healthy. We are only ventilating the left lung so that the surgeons can use the right chest space so they can remove his very large mediastinal mass abutting his heart and large blood vessels.
I am calm.
The electrocardiogram shows a regular, fast heart rate and the young patient’s vital signs are remarkably stable. I already know what I want to do and what the problem is.
I ask the surgeon – who I have never worked with before – if they were tickling the heart? (I already know the answer.) – “Yeah,” muttered from the robot across the room, “we must have been.”
I discuss with the resident – who I have never worked with before – what I see, what I think is underlying the tachycardia, and how we might proceed.
We make a plan. I lead, the resident follows. We solved the problem. We moved on.
I stayed calm. The surgeons were calmed. The resident was educated. The patient was safe.
That’s the job.
Whether I was an underpaid, overworked full-time faculty member executing that or a well-slept, well-compensated independent contract worker, the job is the same.
Does it help to have thousands of hours of subspecialty training and experience managing these types of problems, in exactly these types of patients?
Of course.
But that’s exactly who we are as independent contract physicians: capable, skilled, and, most importantly, experienced. We all bring our unique knowledge and passion everywhere we go. We each have something to offer.
Regardless of what your specialty is or where you practice, nothing changes.
The fundamentals are the fundamentals. The job is the job.
Keep Calm and Carry On.
Whenever you’re ready to consider a different path, reply to this email [email protected] or message me directly on the socials here:
Tell me how I can help your specific situation and find a way for you to take control of your time.
Help Patients. Work Less.
Do More of Everything Else.
