Locum staffing office · Taplow, Berkshire
A staffing office for practices that cover their rota gaps by the booked shift. We hold the gaps a practice sends us, the availability of the people on our books, and the paperwork that has to be complete before those two are put together.
Everything on this site is about the booking. How a shift is requested, what is checked before it is confirmed, what notice moves it, and what is signed once it has been worked.
Rota enquiries: rota@asmedilocum.life
Five days across, three booked blocks down.
Every square is one of three things, and the office works from that and nothing else.
A practice keeps a rota, and a rota has holes in it. The board below is how this office reads one week of those holes: five days across, three booked blocks down, and every square open, requested or covered.
A square moves from open to requested when a practice writes and names the hours it wants held. It moves from requested to covered when the file behind the person is complete and the practice holds the confirmation in writing.
Nothing on the board moves by itself. Each change is a message between two people who keep rotas, and the board is only the place where the office writes that message down so both sides can read it back.
The hours. The site. The block length. The person on site who holds the rota that day.
A booking is a named block of hours at one practice site, agreed before the day and confirmed in writing to the person who keeps the rota. The practice sets the start and the finish, the site, the block length, and the split between work booked ahead and work that arrives the same day.
Those four things are settled before a shift is confirmed, so that the rota can be built against them and reception knows what it is booking into. A shift confirmed without them is a shift somebody has to renegotiate on the morning it starts.
Cover is arranged for the shift in front of it. Where a practice wants the same weekday held across a run of weeks, each shift is still confirmed separately with its own hours and its own block length, because demand at a practice moves and a shift booked in the abstract is usually the one that goes wrong.
On the day the locum works to the shift the practice has set. Any change to the block length, the workload or the finish time is agreed with the practice before it is made, and it is written onto the confirmation, so both sides hold the same account of what was worked.
Where a practice prefers to hold a run of dates under one reference, the office will do that and still send a separate line for each date, because a reference is an administrative convenience and a date is the thing that gets worked.
Six headings, each carrying a practice face and an office face against it.
Six pairings, one to a card. The face showing states what the practice provides for a shift; turn the docket over and every card states what this office confirms under the same heading. The pairing is written out here and in no other part of the site.
The practice provides
The address, the door to use, where to park and who holds the visitor book, with the room ready at the start time named on the confirmation.
This office confirms
The arrival window, photographic identification carried on the day, and the name reception should expect, sent before the shift rather than on it.
The practice provides
A login at the access level the practice has decided a cover shift needs, requested before the day and tested at the start of it rather than halfway through.
This office confirms
Registration details and identifiers sent ahead so access can be built in time, and a smartcard carried where the practice’s own system asks for one.
The practice provides
The hours, the block length and the split between work booked ahead and work arriving the same day, fixed before the shift is confirmed and passed to reception.
This office confirms
The shift worked to the workload the practice has set, with any change to block length or finish time agreed with the practice before it is made.
The practice provides
Its own indemnity arrangements and the induction it gives anyone working in the building for a first shift, including the parts that are specific to that site.
This office confirms
A current entry on the professional register the role requires and indemnity held in the locum’s own name, both confirmed in writing before a first shift is agreed.
The practice provides
The administrative blocks it has reserved inside the shift, named one by one, with the minutes it keeps back for each and who signs off what leaves them.
This office confirms
Those blocks worked as the practice reserved them, and anything still open at the finish time written onto the handover note rather than left to be found.
The practice provides
The name of the person on site who holds the rota that day, the route it wants used when something has to go upwards, and where that person sits.
This office confirms
That route used as the practice set it, the named person told at the time rather than afterwards, and the same thing written onto the handover note.
The file is complete, or the square stays on requested.
A document that reaches its expiry opens the file again.
Placing somebody into a practice building is paperwork before it is anything else, so the office keeps one file for each person on its books and will not confirm a first shift until that file is complete.
The file holds proof of identity, the right-to-work documents, the current entry on the professional register the role requires, indemnity held in that person’s own name, a criminal records disclosure at the level the practice asks for, two references taken up in writing, and the certificates for the training a practice expects anyone working in its building to have done.
Each of those has its own expiry, and the office holds the expiry rather than the document alone. A file that was complete in the spring is not complete in the autumn if a certificate ran out in between, and the square on the board goes back to requested until the replacement is in.
A practice that asks to see the file gets a summary of what is held and the dates each item runs to. Where a practice prefers to hold copies of its own, they are sent with the confirmation and the practice becomes the keeper of that copy from then on.
None of this is unusual and none of it is quick. It is the reason a request placed on a Monday for the following Monday is a comfortable piece of work, and a request placed on a Friday afternoon for the Monday often is not.
Every figure in it comes from the practice.
The arithmetic adds nothing of its own.
The reckoning below takes a booked shift and subtracts the time a practice has already committed inside it. Enter the shift length, the handover reserve, the breaks the practice expects to be taken, and the minutes it keeps back for filing, correspondence, forms and the rota handover at the end.
Each line shows what remains after that subtraction, and the closing line shows the time left for booked work. Where the reserves come to more than the shift holds, the closing line states by how many minutes the shift is over-committed, as a plain figure and nothing more.
Two dates, two lead figures, and the four lines those produce.
A rota gap has two clocks on it. The first is the confirmation lead: the number of days before the shift by which a practice wants the booking settled, so reception can work to it. The second is the cancellation window the two sides have agreed, inside which a shift is treated as held.
Enter the date of the shift, the date the notice is being given, and the two lead figures. The reckoning counts whole days between the dates and prints the two cut-off dates those leads fall on. It compares nothing else and knows nothing about the booking terms a practice has signed.
The timesheet, the invoice and the rota record, in that order.
A shift does not finish when the building empties. It finishes when the hours worked have been signed for, the invoice raised against them agrees with that signature, and the rota record says the same thing as both.
The timesheet is raised against the confirmation, so the hours on it are the hours the practice booked, with any change already written onto the confirmation on the day it was agreed. A practice signs it at the site or by return of e-mail, whichever it prefers, and the office does not raise the invoice until that signature is in.
Invoicing follows the signed timesheet and nothing else. Where a practice runs its purchase ledger against a purchase order number, that number goes on the confirmation at the start rather than being chased at the end, because a correct invoice raised late is still a late invoice.
The rota record is the office’s own account of which squares were covered, by whom and on which dates. It is what a practice is shown when it asks what has been worked this quarter, and it is built from the confirmations rather than from anybody’s memory.
Where something was left open at the finish time, it sits on the handover note against the name of the person the practice told us to give it to. The office keeps a copy of that note with the booking thread, and a practice can ask for it back at any point.
Rota gaps, availability and invoicing queries all arrive at the same place.
Write to rota@asmedilocum.life. A practice gets a usable answer fastest when the first message states four things.
The fourth carries as much weight as the first three. A shift worked alongside a full team is a different piece of work from a shift where the building holds two people, and the answer differs with it.
Correspondence reaches the registered office at 19 Hag Hill Lane, Taplow, Maidenhead SL6 0JW. Where a practice prefers to send a rota extract rather than write the four things out, that is welcome too, as long as the dates on it are the dates it wants covered.