Industry Update - NSW Health Locums
22nd October 2009
We advised in a previous edition of Evolve that there were changes to the NSW Health policy on the employment of locum doctors in pubic hospitals.
Essentially, the process covers non-specialist doctors employed on a casual basis, and focuses on two key areas:
-limitation of salaries and conditions
-regulation of medical locum agencies
Since our previous article, there have been a few changes to the policy, which can be downloaded here.
One of the key changes is that there may be a provision for individual health services to invite you to work outside of the auspices of your registered locum agency. Although this is your decision, we do encourage any of our candidates who might be considering a change to discuss it with us in the first instance to help us understand how we may improve our service to you.
We have unfortunately heard reports of some individual health services putting pressure on candidates, or coercing them to work directly for the service rather than a locum agency. These practices are rare, but we do encourage you to report any such instances to the NSW Health Department on 02 9391 9523 , or by emailing them.