The pursuit of Appiness: 6 Must-Have Apps for Locum Relief Veterinary Professionals

Remember how Charlie’s Angels received practical assistance from Bosley, whilst Batman had Alfred managing his personal life? As a highly in-demand locum relief veterinary professional, you too will benefit from some background support to achieve your full medical superhero potential. Unless you also happen to be a multi-millionaire who can afford a butler, we’d suggest utilizing these six super helpful apps to help you stay focused, calm, and collected both on and off the job…

Painless bookkeeping and accounting

As an independent contractor, you will need to invoice clinics for your time. You’ll also need to perform all bookkeeping duties, including recording payments and tracking business-related expenses to claim later.

Using an app such as Wave can help you to proficiently stay on top of your financial duties, allowing you to create and email professional-looking invoices and keep track of your net income and cash flow, including invoices payable to you, expenses, and bills that you owe.

Having this information summarised online will help out at tax time too. We assure you that your accountant will prefer this neat, searchable system instead of the traditional shoebox of unsorted receipts.

Staying organized and on time

As a locum relief professional, you need to stay on top of all your bookings so that you reliably turn up to each job organized and on time.

Google Calendar will allow you to color code calendar entries, allowing you to discern your work roster and personal events schedules at a glance. This is not only useful for helping you to organize your overall work-life balance, but it can be invaluable if you get a last-minute job opportunity, and need to quickly ascertain your availability. If required, you can also use the app to schedule a Google Meeting with prospective employers to discuss further details.

Lastly, events from Gmail, such as flight or hotel bookings, will also be added to the calendar automatically, which is helpful for locums who are regularly traveling between jobs. That will be all thanks Jeeves, er, we mean Google.

A spare veterinary brain in your pocket

Working as a locum, you may miss having a team of familiar colleagues whose brains you can pick about tricky cases, particularly if you’re in a sole charge position. Having a portable, easily searchable source of up-to-date veterinary clinical information can be an invaluable confidence booster, and helps ensure that you’re offering your patients the best possible standard of care.

Truth: we’re cheating a little here and counting this entire category as one app, as the best app will depend on your particular preferences and requirements.

For general small animal veterinary work, many clinicians find Veterinary Advisor: Dogs and Cats (Cote’s Clinical Advisor) an essential one-stop-shop to aid day-to-day practice. Whilst it is a reasonably significant upfront purchase, this app is marketed as six veterinary textbooks in one, covering a huge array of diseases and disorders and common procedures and techniques (including free access to a companion website containing images and video content). It also contains a searchable drug compendium, clinical algorithms, and client handouts. Handy!

If you’ll be working in the emergency field, consider purchasing the Kimba Small Animal Emergency Medicine app. This app gives a concise, searchable overview of common emergency issues and their therapy, quick check data (e.g. CPR emergency drugs and doses), concise background theory on analgesia, fluid therapy, neurological lesion localization, and more. There’s also practical guidance regarding how to perform some procedures such as ultrasonography for free fluid, gastric lavage, and nasal oxygen catheter placement.

For the most thorough, current guide on the practical usage of veterinary drugs, the Plumb’s app is invaluable. Whilst you have to pay an annual subscription fee, many clinicians feel it is well worth it to consistently have access to the most up-to-date pharmacological information without having to upgrade textbooks every few years.

And lastly, for those of us who hate doing maths, particularly under pressure, consider the Vetcalculators app. Just enter your patient’s weight and the app can provide you with an array of calculated drug doses, including anesthetic and emergency drugs, continuous rate infusions, fluid therapy, and blood transfusions. We guarantee this mathematical app will be a positive addition (see what we did there?) to your professional life

Chilling out after work

Veterinary practice can be stressful at times. Whether you are at home or traveling, it’s important to unplug and take some well-needed R&R to help maintain your mental and physical wellbeing.

Many locums find that regular meditation helps to relieve stress, aid good quality sleep, and improve calm focus. The Headspace app provides guidance on mindfulness and meditation practices and staged programs to help track your progress (which can motivate goal-oriented individuals). The app provides an array of guided meditations to suit various personal health goals, and sessions as short as three minutes to fit into your busy schedule.

Making the most of your trip

If you’re a full-time locum, you will be traveling frequently. Having an app such as TripAdvisor can help you make the most of your new locations, allowing you to find highly-rated local eateries and activities to enjoy during your downtime. After all, one of the joys of locum life is the opportunity to explore new towns and attractions. Does anyone fancy checking out The Big Potato (a surprisingly well-rated tourist attraction located in Robertson, NSW, Australia) or the best shrimp restaurant in New Orleans?

Additionally, if your hiring clinic doesn’t provide you with somewhere to stay, you can also search TripAdvisor for local comfortable but cost-effective accommodation options that won’t eat up all your funds.

A portable filing cabinet

The Adobe Scan app turns your smartphone into a scanner, allowing you to save and organize paper documents as digital files (PDF or JPEG). This is invaluable for locums who need to keep important documents (such as signed contracts) on-hand, or have personal identification documents (such as licenses) readily available whilst traveling.

The app also recognizes text automatically, meaning you can scan receipts to keep track of your travel expenses, or even take copies of notes written on a whiteboard.

The assistance of these handy apps will help keep you feeling organized, confident, and relaxed, ready to jump in and assist busy veterinary clinics like the superhero locum that you are. Now, get ready to save some puppies and kittens and leap questionable floor puddles in a single bound!

Finding work

Of course, it’s all very well to be fully prepared and organized as a locum relief veterinary professional…but without work opportunities, you may quickly start to drift back towards a full-time veterinary role that doesn’t quite suit your lifestyle or goals, but does pay the bills.

That’s where a Web App like VETERINARYlocumotion can be an actual lifesaver – a functional, secure, user-friendly app to find locum relief work or locum relief professionals for practices – but not bloated by a whole lot of bells and whistles – you can build a simple but highly professional Profile in moments, add your Credentials and Resume and quickly and easily add to and maintain your availability calendar, and then set your criteria for location, distance, type of Veterinary Hospital or Clinic and your daily rate range. Pre-Register here.

References

• Five apps to make your locum life easier – 2015 – https://www.bpmed.com.au/blog/65/five-apps-to-make-your-locum-life-easier – Accessed 11 April 2022

• The only smartphone apps you will ever need to hack your locum tenens life – 3 November 2018 – https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/locum-tenens-smartphone-apps – Accessed 11 April 2022

• 20 stellar apps for physicians: tools to help make your life – and your locum tenens assignments – easier – 13 June 2018 – https://gmedical.com/blog/20-stellar-apps-for-physicians-tools-to-help-make-your-life-and-your-locum-tenens-assignments-easier/ – Accessed 11 April 2022

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