As a locum, you’re responsible for finding your own work, managing all your finances and keeping up with of all your learning and career development.
To help make all this easier, we've created this Locum Toolkit: a curation of the most useful resources, services, and tools that you’ll need as a locum.
This is our free and easy way to calculate your potential gross earnings as a Locum Doctor. It's specific to your grade, specialty, and region, and is based on the data of over 40,000 real individual locum jobs.
👉 Locum Doctor Salary Calculator
Here are some of our most popular articles on Locum Pay from our Locum Doctor Hub. Where we feature articles on everything locum related.
👉 Locum Rates: What Can I Expect?
👉 Locum Rates in London
👉 Tips to Increase Your Locum Pay
👉 SHO Locum Rates: Which Specialties Pay Best?
Our article featuring some of our favourite tips to help you understand the National Insurance, Income Tax, and Pension aspect of your payslip. It will also give you advice on what expense you can claim back tax on, potentially saving you hundreds of pounds each year.
👉 Managing Your Finances as a Locum Doctor
This is a great app if your trust uses NHS SBS. You’ll need to know your ESR or payroll number to register, but once you're set up you’ll have an electronic record of all your payslips in one place. It’s also worth noting that your locum agency won’t usually provide you with payslips, so this is a great way of making sure that your tax code, pay, and deductions are all correct.
👉 My SBS Pay
This tool from Medics Money helps you to to calculate how much of your tax you could reclaim from your professional expenses as a doctor. For most, this adds up a £100 - £200 per year.
👉 Tax Rebate Calculator
This tools from Medics Money helps you to understand how much you'll earn with your net salary once you subtract all your tax, loan re-payments, cost of living, and any other expenses, so you know what your budget is each month.
👉 The Salary Calculator
Numbeo is a great tool, especially if you're considering moving to a new city. It allows you to work out everything from rent and utility bills specific to a location, to the cost of bread, so that you can estimate your monthly outgoings.
👉 Numbeo
There are a few ways to find locum work, with the most common being through a Locum Agency or Staff Bank. Here's some information to help you understand the difference between the 2 and to get you started.
👉 Banks vs Agency
👉 A Step-By-Step Guide to Locuming Through Agencies
👉 How To Get The Most From Agencies
👉 The Key Registration Questions for Locum Doctors
Unlike traditional methods. Messly's free Locum Finding App gives you access to work from over 20 of the best locum agencies in the UK, all in one place. Our service has been trusted by 6,000 Locum Doctors this year and is rated 5 star on Trustpilot.
👉 Locum Finding Service
👉 Why Messly is the Best Way to Find Locum Work
Doing locum work through your hospital's staff bank can be a great alternative to working through a locum agency, especially if you’re only looking to work local shifts on an ad-hoc basis. Here are two apps to help you book and manage your bank work.
👉 Locum's Nest: For Hospital Staff Banks
👉 Patchwork: Another One For Hospital Staff Banks
👉 My Locum Manager: For GP Practice Banks
If you're going to be locuming in a new specialty for the first time, we’ve written some useful guides to help you prepare for your first shift in each one.
👉 Tips For Your First Day In New Hospital
👉 Obstetrics and Gynaecology
👉 General Medicine
👉 Paediatrics
👉 General Surgery
👉 Trauma and Orthopaedics
👉 Emergency Medicine
This might seem a surprising one for many of you, but there are few things worse than than spending hours trying to park on your first day. Here are some great apps for finding parking spots:
👉 Parkopedia - Find Parking Spaces
👉 Your Parking Space - Rent out A Private Parking Spot
👉 JustPark - Another Private Parking Space Rental App
This is one of our personal favourites. It only takes a few minutes to set up, but once you have you'll have access to all the important bleeps and extension numbers that you'll need. It's also completely free.
👉 Induction
Each Trust will have varying Antibiotic guidelines, which can make it difficult for Locum Doctors to get use to. That's where MicroGuide comes in handy. This useful app breaks down various pathologies by system and gives you Trust-Specific guidance for first line, second line and even Penicillin allergic prescribing.
👉 MicroGuide
This app features risk stratification scores, medical equations, and even guidelines to help you manage your patients. Use it to work out scores such as GRACE, Wells, and PERC and see up to date guidance on management. It's especially useful for an A&E.
👉 MDCalc
Mind The Bleep was set up with the purpose to provide free teaching and guidance for both Medical Students and Junior Doctors. Providing salient overviews over a multitude of medical and surgical conditions.
👉 Mind The Bleep
Pulsenotes offers a free library of various medical topics in bullet pointed form. They also offer a cheap membership to gain access to their topic-specific question banks, video lectures and courses.
👉 Pulsenotes
If you continue to Locum at your previous hospital, you can usually arrange for them to extend your current portfolio system (i.e. eHorus). Alternatively, MedAll provides a free portfolio service to store all your collected evidence (Mini-CEX and CBD's), as well as a bulletin board to find medical courses and CPD events. eLogbook is another useful free ePortfolio aimed for budding surgeons.
👉 MedAll
👉 eLogbook
If you're organised, sometimes keeping a hard-copy is easier. Rather than wait for your trainer to "respond" to an email to get your signature for a CBD, you can can get a signature there and then. Most of the Royal Colleges will have there own forms that you can use and store.
👉 ISCP - Offers free surgical based portfolio forms
👉 JRCPT - Offers medical based portfolio forms
👉 Royal College Of Psychiatrist
👉 Royal College Of Ophthalmologist
👉 Feel free to Google other specialty specific work-based assessment forms
These tools help you find CPD courses that support your professional development and career aspirations. Please note that Simply CPD and CPD Match tend to offer cheaper and/or free courses, whilst the BMJs version tends to find more expensive courses.
👉 Simply CPD
👉 CPD Match
👉 BMJ Course Finder
A list of the top MCQ banks covering multiple specialties, you can use these to prepare for the MSRA, MRCP, MRCS, and more.
👉 Pass Medicine
👉 PasTest
👉 OnExamination
You’ll find these contain all the information you'll need to know for each specialty at the SHO stage. You can find various version of this adapted to each specialty.
👉 Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
With more specialties adopting the MSRA than not, the GP Notebook is a very useful, free resource that supports your MCQ exam preparation with succinct bullet-pointed clinical work-ups and management plans.
👉 The GP Notebook
We won't recommend any courses here as we don't think they're necessary, whilst being very expensive. However, if you feel like you’d benefit from one, you’ll find plenty of options for each specialty with a simple Google search.
A community page to ask questions and post interesting facts and tools about everything related to F3 Doctors. From time to time you'll also find us advertising some of our extremely unique F3 Jobs here (i.e. International, Cruise Ship, Aesthetic, Clinical Trials and Lifestyle Medicine roles have all been pasted in the last year).
👉 Foundation Year 3 Doctors
One of the most active Junior Doctor forums out there. You'll find daily threads about general JD life, as well as about F3 and locum years. It's also great place to read funny incidents and the occasional rant.
👉 r/JuniorDoctorsUK
Working in a new country can be hard, especially when you're doing it alone. In this group you'll find a mix of doctors who are in the process of moving or have already settled in the UK for work. Feel free to ask questions, discuss any issues that you've faced, and share helpful tips in this supportive group.
👉 International Medical Graduates in the UK
Whether you need help starting out as a locum, finding the best agencies, or tips for managing your finances, Messly's comprehensive Locum guides has you covered.
👉 Locum Doctor Hub
If you're considering an F3 year, you might want to check out our F3 Resource Hub, which features a range of helpful articles to help you understand what your options are and make the most of your year.
👉 F3 Resource Hub
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T: 020 4525 5373
E: support@messly.co.uk
