Power of the locum

When I exited residency I felt confident that I knew what I wanted in my clinical career. I had completed a range of electives and had rotated through a variety of family medicine clinics and emergency departments, and so I believed I had a reasonable idea of what my priorities were. However, the transition from a resident on June 30th to an independent practising physician on July 1st came with a number of interesting surprises. I found that the knowledge and clinical experiences that I had gathered throughout my training, while excellent, had considerable gaps; administrative structures, overhead and billing formulae, holiday time, and colleague coverage were only some of the issues that I had not been fully exposed to. Pulling back the curtain on the administrative or departmental meetings that were taking place allowed me to appreciate that there was far more going on behind the scenes of a group practice than I had initially known about or would have been exposed to as a resident