It’s important to be flexible when it comes to applying for new locum physician jobs, but it’s also important to be honest about how far you are willing to travel for work.
Evaluate Your Travel Time
The first question to ask yourself is whether you can drive or not. For many of our locum physician/healthcare jobs, driving is the best way to reach the clinic/medical facility where you will be working. If the location of a workplace is only accessible by car, you should think twice before applying.
If you do drive, then that opens up more locum physician jobs to you. But the next question would then be how far the location is from your place of residence. If the workplace is within 100 kilometres of where you are located, and it’s accessible by highway or expressway, getting to work is not a problem. If the distance is greater than 100 kilometres, or the route to get to work involves smaller auxiliary country roads, then your commute might not be feasible.
If you really are interested in travelling further to get to work, you should consider the work travel assignments we have across Canada’s provinces. For very remote areas such as Northern Manitoba and interior British Columbia, you could be flown in and out and given accommodation close to the locum shift location. When these opportunities come around, you have the chance to broaden your professional experience and go on an adventure to new places in Canada at the same time.
Try to Think From Our Perspective
Think about how an employer or healthcare placement agency like us would think about your travel time, too. During any job application process, the address of an applicant is reviewed by the employer before they are hired. RPI Consulting Group Inc. is not unusual in that we pinpoint where our physicians and other healthcare job applicants live. We don’t do this to discriminate against employees. On the contrary, your address is looked at so we can get a sense of what your commute to work will be like.
If your commute will be over two hours, that will make us concerned about whether you will be motivated to go to work every day that you are needed. Driving two hours each way for days on end would tire even the most committed employee.
If your locum physician or nurse shifts take place during the winter, we would have concerns about the reliability of you travelling to work. Many of our Clients’ medical clinics are located in remote, rural regions of Canada, where the roads may be slow to travel on. Depending on the location, we would prefer if you were located closer to our Client’s location. If they are particularly far away, you might even be paid for accommodation that’s near to work.
An Excellent Way to Build Healthcare Work Experience
At the end of the day, locum assignments offer physicians, nurses, medical specialists, and other healthcare personnel the opportunity to add valuable work experience to their resumes. Seeking locum medical job opportunities will broaden your network and help you obtain the amount of experience required to later gain full-time, long-term employment.
While there is no guarantee that a locum shift will lead to full-time employment, you will at least be reinforcing your professional reputation as a flexible, dependable employee. The ability to adapt to new workplaces and successfully continue a healthcare facility’s operations as before is a very desirable skill to have.
