WHY YOU NEED TO DO LOCUM (PART 3).

As you know doing locum forced you to work fast and finishes all the reporting urgently, or at the latest 1 hour after the examination is completed. This is a very good practise to your alertness and diagnostic sharpness. You must or forced to make a diagnosis within minutes. If you don't know, you have to find the answer in a very short period either via the internet or books. By doing frequent locums, your sharpness in making a diagnosis and rapidity in producing report increases. Getting back your current practise in government hospital, with this behavioural change, you tend to finish your report as urgently as possible. This would be good for the patients in your current hospital.

So by doing frequent locums, you don't only get more money, you will have behavioural change, control your anger, talk more courteously to patients and other doctors and also increase the productivity of your current hospital. Go ahead, do more locums..... Hehe!!

WHY YOU NEED TO DO LOCUM (PART 2)

Patient population in both private and government hospitals are slightly different. In private hospitals, they are more demanding and sometimes complaint a lot. Most of the private physicians tends to be more accepting to the behaviour of their patients. By doing locums, you will learn to change your approach to these patients. You also tend to control your anger even when your are in a tense position. You also tend to talk more or explain more to the patients about the procedures and findings of an examination. Even though, sometimes these behavioural changes may be a false change, it can be beneficial to you. By doing frequent locums, these behavioural changes can be a second nature to you. Going back to your service in the government hospital, these behavioural changes ie controlling your anger to patient's behaviour and explaining in detail about procedures and findings to patient, will be good to the patients in the hospital that you are currently practising.

Besides that, in receiving request for examinations in the department, in private hospital you tend to accept any request from the physician without any question. By doing frequent locums, the behaviour to reject a request for an examination can be diluted because of this. Going back to your service in the government hospital, the behavioural changes of not wanting to reject an examination would be good to the patients there. You will try not to reject requests for examination from housemans by using petty reasons.

So, doing frequent locums is actually good especially in changing your behaviour to patients and also housemans/physician. So, please do more locums. For those who have never done any locum, please do it. It is good for your health. Haha!!

WHY YOU NEED TO DO LOCUM?

A simple answer is for the money of course. But apart from that, there is another reason. After all the hardwork to become a subspecialist, you tend to do or see more cases in your subspecialty field. You tend to neglect other work or modalities. As for me, I don't see any mammography images anymores, since I practically hate it. However, you need to keep abreast in all the advances in all the modalities. You also need to update and maintain your expertise in all the modalities. You can say that you will never resign from the government service, but time will tell. For this you have the need to maintain your knowledge and expertise in all modalities, besides improving your expertise in your subspecialty field.

To get all this, you need to do locum. During locum as you all know, you will see all types of cases in all modalities. To further maintain this, you need to do locum frequently, or at least once in two months. Would be better if you can get a daily part time locum after office hours or during weekends in your local private hospital...... This would be a better justification apart from the money..