Locum Field Notes | A Neurologist's Reset, A Radiologist Goes Hybrid & More (September 2026)

By Locumpedia Editorial

2026-09-06

Locum Field Notes is Locumpedia’s monthly roundup of first-person accounts from locum providers, curated from agency blogs across the industry. Each edition summarizes the month’s most worthwhile provider stories and links to each original. Every agency is treated identically and no placement is paid for.

Every month we read the provider stories agencies publish across the industry and pull out the ones worth your time. It’s a short set this month, four clinicians, but they share a clear thread: none of them went locums to do less. They did it to decide, assignment by assignment, what the work would be.

A Neurologist Rebuilds the Job on His Own Terms

Dr. Bertrand Liang built a career spanning academic, corporate and clinical roles as a neurologist and neuro-hospitalist. Over time, he found the rigid policies, documentation requirements and uncompensated administrative work of traditional roles increasingly restrictive. He wanted greater flexibility and more control over how he practiced medicine.

Locum tenens is how he took it back. Now he chooses his own assignments, decides when and where he works and builds the week around the medicine he actually wants to do. The autonomy the old model had worn down returned almost immediately, and it’s the baseline of how he practices now. He didn’t have to leave the field to get there, either. He’s still on faculty at the University of Colorado, still teaching and still very much a working neurologist.

What he’s clear-eyed about is who this suits. His advice to physicians weighing the move is refreshingly unsentimental: locums rewards competence and the ability to find your footing fast in a place you don’t know yet. For Liang, the trade was never about working less. It was about deciding, for himself, what the work would be.

From: “Practicing Medicine on Your Own Terms” — Jackson & Coker · Aug 18, 2026

A Radiologist Curates His Own Schedule

For a radiologist, the deal that usually comes with the job is a quiet trade: steady work in exchange for someone else owning your calendar. Dr. Klodnicki didn’t treat that as fixed.

He combines a flexible remote radiology job with on-site locum assignments. He limits the locum assignments he considers to opportunities in Texas within about a five-hour radius of home. The mix lets him decide how heavy a given month gets and keeps him close to home when he wants to be.

Strong demand for radiology locum work is what makes it possible; he can be selective about which assignments he takes and when. The result is a schedule he curates rather than one handed to him, with room left for the life outside the reading room.

From: “I Can Curate My Schedule”: How Dr. Klodnicki Built a Locum Career Around His Life — Interim Physicians · Aug 20, 2026

An NP on When to Extend and When to Walk

Sophia Khawley has worked as a nurse practitioner across eleven states, and every travel assignment eventually forces the same decision: re-up, or move on.

She’s built a rule for it. She weighs the site and the team, the pay, the location and where she is in her own life, and she’s honest that the answer shifts with all of them. A geriatrics clinic in Virginia she liked enough to extend more than once. A California site she turned down over how it was managed and staffed.

There’s no formula to it. What it takes is paying attention, and locums gives an NP the room to leave a bad fit and go back to a good one. Khawley treats each decision as its own rather than a default.

From: “How I Decide Whether to Extend a Locums Assignment” — CompHealth · Aug 12, 2026

A Dentist Turns Short Stints Into a Long Game

Dr. Vikram Ravoory didn’t plan to build anything on locums. He took his first dentistry assignment as a stopgap between jobs, a way to keep working while he sorted out what came next.

The assignments taught him more than he expected. Moving between practices, business models and patient mixes, he got good at walking into an unfamiliar office and doing solid work quickly, and he got a close look at what different setups were actually like from the inside.

One of those assignments became the permanent role he’d been looking for. He’d effectively tried the place on before committing, which is the quiet advantage of the model: you learn a practice by working in it, then decide.

From: “From Locum Dentist to Locumpreneur: How Dr. Vikram Ravoory Built a More Adaptable Career” — Barton Associates · Aug 19, 2026

Across all four stories, the common thread is quieter than ‘flexibility’: the work gave each clinician more say over a decision a traditional staff job might otherwise make for them. They made those decisions themselves.