Read time: 2 minutes
There are many ways to spend a lifetime working at a hospital.
Most clinicians work Monday through Friday.
Most have to cover holidays, weekends, and nights.
As a result, they work when they would prefer to be doing something else.
I know I’ve missed half a dozen weddings (that I would have liked to attend), the funeral of a grandparent, and innumerable holiday and birthday parties over the decades because of my work schedule.
When you are in training or just starting out, you can’t get choosy with your schedule.
But for those of you with more experience at your full-time job, working part-time, or locum/per diem you have the rare opportunity to create a schedule that works for you.
Think outside the box
I’ve been pretty adamant about trying to find a better work-life balance through working less overall as an independent contract physician.
But maybe your goal is to make as much money as possible like my friend Steve.
– Who says you need to hold 1 contract at a time?
Instead of scaling back his total hours, locum contracting allows him to chunk his work weeks to make the most money in the shortest amount of time.
He weaves together multiple locum contracts at the same time: a 3 day weekend in upstate NY covering OR and OB (as an anesthesiologist) call nonstop from a hotel room, then he flies to NYC Monday, works Tuesday through Friday at a local hospital (with one or two of those nights on call added), he flies to the mid-west over the weekend and works the following week with a few calls added before he returns home.
It’s a lot to type and it’s even more to fathom!
But in that time he’s able to log about 300 hours at an average rate of ~$250/hr (depending on hours and how many cases he gets “called in” for from the hotel), for a total of ~$75,000 in less than 3 weeks.
It doesn’t sound relaxing.
But for someone with the right disposition, it offers an opportunity to pad the checking account and accumulate frequent flier miles in short order.
More is more
What if you want to squeeze a bit more juice out of your current schedule.
Let’s say you have a pretty cush full-time w2 job working as an anesthesiologist from 7 to 3, five days each week (apparently they are out there!).
You wish it paid more, but you can’t complain.
What can you do?
Find a way to augment your schedule helping out an overworked hospital or ambulatory surgery center nearby from 3pm to 8pm once or twice each week.
They could probably use the help for what is likely an overworked staff and you might as well get paid well for your time.
Somebody has to work weekends
A close family friend of ours is a Family Nurse Practitioner who was looking for a way out of her 3 twelves each week at a hospital in town.
She wanted to work remotely, but was worried about the trade to working 5 days each week (the 5-day schedule fear is real, if all you’ve known for 2 decades is 13 shifts each month!).
Instead, she found a better option for her: a remote position that only required 4 ten hour shifts each week as long as she worked each weekend (she could choose the 2 weekdays and no holidays were required).
Working 8 hours each weekend day wasn’t ideal, but the job consistency would allow for easier child-care (compared to her previous position which had no set days), and it paid 15% more plus no commuting time wasted!
Summary
None of these examples above sound enticing to me, but that’s not the point:
Alternative schedules do exist.
And some of them might even meet your and your family’s needs better than the cookie-cutter approach that most clinicians accept.
Deliberately choose how you spend your time.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
1) Let’s talk through what choosing your own path through medicine looks like. Over the phone, confidential, free:
https://calendly.com/tonyvullo/20min
2) Free Guides and Resources to Help You Reclaim Your Time and Autonomy:
