The pharmacy team looks different than it used to
Walk into a community pharmacy today and you’ll find a genuinely different team to the one that existed five years ago.
According to NHS England's 2025 Community Pharmacy Workforce Survey, twelve per cent of community pharmacists now hold an independent prescribing qualification, with over three thousand independent prescribers (IPs) now working in the sector, and qualified pharmacy technician numbers have grown by more than a quarter, from 5,403 to 6,943, as their roles expand.
Services have grown alongside them. The team a locum steps into on any given day is more skill-mixed, more specialised, and more service-heavy than it was even recently.
That shift matters for how independents think about locum management. A locum isn’t just filling a rota gap in a static job, they’re stepping into a genuinely more complex operating environment, often for just a few hours, and expected to perform at full capacity from the first patient.
Where locum management usually breaks down
The most common failure point isn't skill or willingness, it’s information.
Locums are frequently briefed verbally on arrival, handed whatever's remembered rather than what's current, or left to piece together service changes, SOP updates or payment terms from a WhatsApp thread or an old email chain.
A locum might arrive to find the pharmacy now runs a Pharmacy First consultation service that didn't exist on their last visit, or that a technician has taken on checking responsibilities the locum assumes still sit with the pharmacist.
None of that is anyone’s fault exactly, it's simply how information tends to travel in a busy, understaffed environment. But it means locums often start a shift already behind, working from partial or outdated knowledge in a team that’s more complicated than it looks from the outside.
The knock-on effects are predictable: repeated questions that eat into a manager’s time, inconsistent service delivery, and a locum who leaves the shift feeling like a visitor rather than a contributor, regardless of how capable they are.
Treat locums as part of the team, not a stopgap
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require a shift in mindset. A few practical changes make a disproportionate difference:
- Give locums a current, structured briefing, not tribal knowledge relayed on the day, but the same SOPs, service information and payment terms every permanent team member works from, kept up to date.
- Make service context explicit. If the pharmacy now offers a service that it didn't a year ago or has pharmacy technicians handling responsibilities that used to sit with the pharmacist, say so clearly before the shift starts, not mid-way through it.
- Close the loop after the shift. A short handover or feedback exchange — what worked, what didn’t, anything worth flagging — turns a one-off booking into the start of a working relationship, and signals that the locum’s experience actually matters to the practice.
- Assign a named point of contact for the shift. Even a five-minute introduction to who to ask when something’s unclear saves far more time than it costs and removes the guesswork that leads to locums making assumptions instead of asking.
None of this requires new technology or significant investment. It requires treating the locum as a team member who happens to be temporary, rather than a temporary presence who happens to be doing a team member’s work.
From trusted locum to future hire
There's a wider payoff to getting this right. Independents who consistently brief and manage locums well tend to build a small, trusted pool of people who want to come back — which matters more as teams become harder to run on generalist knowledge alone.
Some of those trusted locums, given the right ongoing relationship, become genuine candidates for permanent or more regular roles further down the line.
This can cut recruitment costs and onboarding time compared with hiring cold, since a returning locum already knows the systems, the team and the standards expected.
Seen this way, good locum management isn't a peripheral HR nicety, it’s an extension of the same workforce planning independents already apply to their permanent staff.
As pharmacy teams continue to diversify, the practices that make locums effective and willing to return are the same ones that make any team function well: clarity, consistency, and being genuinely brought into the fold, even for a single shift.
Jonathon Clarke is the founder and CEO of Locate a Locum.
