Running a pharmacy can be an exciting way to earn a living and at the same time very profitable. Pharmacists are a lot better paid than many other professions. All right, you’re not quite up there with a consultant brain surgeon, but nonetheless it is an important job and serves to maintain the health of your customers. However, when you run a pharmacy there can be situations whereyou have staff absent from work for one reason or another. This could be due to ill health, an accident, bereavement leave, paternity leave, getting called away on jury service, getting delayed abroad after a holiday, and more. Short Notice
Unfortunately, with the possible exception of maternity/paternity leave, most of these situations happen at very short notice. Furthermore, in a lot of cases you may have no idea how long that staff member is going to be away. Take jury service, for example: it could be a couple of days, but equally it could be a couple of months. Now if you have a pharmacist away from your practice for a couple of days, no doubt the rest of the team will be able to cover for him or her. However, if they are going to be away for any length of time, then you are going to need a locum pharmacist to take their place. Between the UK and Ireland, there are over 14,000 pharmacies, and they each need two or three pharmacists to cover the opening hours every week. This means that many of them will use a locum to cover gaps in their rosters such as holidays, sick leave, paternity leave, and so on. That can be an attractive opportunity for pharmacists who enjoy working as a locum for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is that a locum pharmacist can earn more than one in steady employment. In turn, of course, that means that a pharmacy has to pay more to cover the same number of hours. Nonetheless, it is necessary for them to do so in order to provide the services to their customers. In turn, this is why, as a pharmacy owner or partner, you should take out locum insurance which will cover you for the extra expenses of paying for a locum whenever you need one. So instead of the extra costs coming off your bottom line at the year end, the insurance company will pay them for you.
0 Comments
When you have an optician practice it can be a profitable and enjoyable way to earn your living, taking care of your patients’ eyesight as you do. However, one of the dangers of running such a practice is that you can often have a situation where one of your team members is away from work. This can be for a variety of different reasons, and it could be for a couple of days or for a much longer period – even running into months. Another issue for many individual optician practices is that quite often there is just one optician. That might be you or it could be an employee, but if your optician goes sick or has an accident and is away for two or three months your business comes to a grinding halt. Even if you have, say, three opticians, if one is absent, it still has a major effect on your business and upon your patients as well. Your Optician Might Leave
There can be another issue as well, and that is that if your optician, or one of your opticians leaves to go to another job, you have the same problem. But getting another optician on board can take time. The job site Indeed has reported that over two thirds of optician jobs advertised on its’ site stay vacant for more than two months! OK, if you happen to be Specsavers, you can probably draft in an optician from somewhere else without a problem, but then again, you are not Specsavers, are you? So, your only option is to hire a locum for the period of absence, but locums are expensive. This is why it is essential for you to take out optician locum insurance to cover for these eventualities. The optician locum insurance that we offer at Approachable Locum Insurance can cover you for all of these situations and more. Paying for a locum yourself can have a serious effect on your profits for the year, especially if you need one for weeks on end, but the insurance will cover you for all the extra expense. The insurance policy will cover you for accident or illness of your optician anywhere in the world, jury service (yes, that can happen), compassionate leave, paternity leave, suspension for any reason, and more. Furthermore, the policy cannot be cancelled, declined, or restricted for any reason, no matter how many claims you may make on it. Talk to us about your precise requirements. |