Editor’s Note
What clinicians want from their careers can change with experience. A first job may reveal that a certain schedule, workplace, or environment isn’t the right fit, while time in practice can bring other priorities into focus. Sometimes that means changing jobs; other times, it means reconsidering where or how you work.
Locum tenens can give physicians and advanced practice providers more ways to explore those choices. Assignments can offer firsthand exposure to a variety of clinical settings, locations, and schedules while also providing opportunities to supplement income or build a career around more than one type of work. Trying those options can provide a clearer sense of what aligns with a clinician’s professional and personal goals.
Career decisions don’t have to be permanent to be worthwhile. Changing direction, working in a new setting, or pursuing more than one professional interest can all offer useful perspective along the way. This edition of Locums CME looks at some of those possibilities, from early-career job changes and specialty decisions to portfolio careers and finding the right place to practice.
– The Locumpedia Editorial Team
Lead Story
Is Early-Career Physician Turnover Always a Bad Thing?
July 21, 2026 | American Medical Association
Nearly 60% of physicians leave their first post-training job within three years, and more than 25% consider leaving within the first year. Median annual turnover runs about 7% overall, according to the 2025 AAPPR Physician and Provider Recruitment Benchmarking Report. That churn isn’t automatically evidence of a bad decision, since early-career physicians are still learning which practice environments, compensation models, and schedules actually fit them.
Salary often dominates the first job search when average medical school debt exceeds $200,000, but it may carry less weight as financial pressure eases and autonomy, flexibility, and other factors move up the priority list. Providers sometimes need to change jobs to advance, relocate for family, or move toward work that better matches how they want to practice. A role can still provide useful experience even when it doesn’t become a long-term home.
Locum tenens clinicians have a practical advantage here, since interim assignments expose them to different hospitals, staffing models, call expectations, and workplace cultures without requiring every move to become a multiyear commitment. Each assignment becomes another data point about what works, what doesn’t, and which tradeoffs are worth accepting. That same scrutiny of workload, leadership, and compensation is worth applying before committing to any role, temporary or permanent.
Your Locums Prescription
Using Locums as the Base of Your Physician Portfolio Career
August 5, 2026 | Era Locums
A physician portfolio career replaces dependence on one full-time employer with a deliberate mix of clinical and nonclinical work. Locum assignments can supply the core income while leaving room for telemedicine, consulting, or a business, rather than piecing together unrelated work. The goal is building work streams that support each other instead of recreating an overloaded schedule.
Freedom like this still needs a system behind it. Clinicians need a realistic income target, clear limits on travel and call, and dedicated time for taxes and recovery. A clear plan, reviewed regularly, is what keeps the mix sustainable, even when a high-paying shift is tempting to add.
Locum Tenens Pay for PAs: A Physician Assistant’s Guide to Salary and Compensation
July 28, 2026 | CompHealth
Locum tenens physician assistants currently earn about $70 to $135 or more per hour, with specialty, geographic location, and experience level all affecting the rate. Procedure-heavy work and specialized inpatient assignments generally fall toward the higher end. Rural facilities, critical access hospitals, and shortage areas often pay a premium specifically because they struggle to recruit permanent clinicians.
The hourly number still isn’t the whole compensation picture, since travel, housing, and employment classification can materially change the value of a locum opportunity. Experienced PAs also have more options, as many facilities want providers who can enter a workflow with minimal orientation. Some positions require at least one or two years of clinical experience before a new graduate can be considered.
The Student Loan Trap: Using Locums to Pay Down Your Debt
August 6, 2026 | Hayes Locums
Student loan debt can keep following physicians long after the attending paycheck arrives, with average medical school debt now exceeding $200,000. Extra locum assignments offer one way to direct additional clinical income toward principal without giving up a permanent job. Even occasional weekend or holiday coverage can create a separate repayment stream.
The math only works when providers budget from net income rather than the advertised rate, since 1099 taxes and other expenses have to come out before setting a realistic monthly debt target. One example shows $5,000 in monthly supplemental income paying off $200,000 in a little over three years, if every dollar goes toward loans. The scenario illustrates one possible outcome, not a universal timetable.
AI on Call
- California lawmakers are advancing legislation that would bar AI chatbots from operating as unsupervised therapists and require licensed-clinician review before AI tools can guide mental healthcare.
- A new survey found that 71% of health systems seeing measurable AI value still aren’t scaling it, with EHR integration, not clinician distrust, now the top barrier at 44%.
- Twelve major health systems launched a Diagnostic AI Consortium with Aidoc as radiologists have left the field at a 50% higher rate since 2020, a shortage researchers project will persist through 2055.
Wellness Retreat
Imposter Syndrome: How to Overcome Self-Doubt During Residency and Beyond
June 10, 2026 | VITAL WorkLife
Imposter syndrome follows plenty of clinicians past graduation, affecting roughly 33% to 44% of residents and nearly 25% of physicians over the course of a career. Constant evaluation, steep learning curves, and the shift from high-achieving student to inexperienced trainee can make ordinary uncertainty feel like evidence that someone doesn’t belong. Confidence tends to build naturally as competence and repetition accumulate over time.
That same kind of self-doubt can resurface for locum clinicians changing facilities, since new EHRs, unfamiliar teams, and different protocols can expose knowledge gaps fast with little runway to adjust. Asking questions early, recognizing what’s already known, and seeking a second opinion when needed all work better than trying to hide uncertainty through overwork. Peer connections and professional support can also help normalize what’s actually a common, temporary experience rather than a personal failing.
The Burnout Crisis Among Cardiac CT Specialists Is Getting Worse
August 7, 2026 | Cardiovascular Business
Burnout among cardiovascular imagers is becoming a staffing problem with real access consequences. In a survey of roughly 250 cardiologists and radiologists presented at the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography’s 2026 annual meeting, nearly 60% reported burnout symptoms and about 20% were considering leaving clinical practice. Nearly 70% said they routinely finished documentation and administrative work after hours.
Heavy workload, thin staffing support, and inflexible schedules were the most common drivers cited. Locum clinicians in imaging departments should watch volume expectations, after-hours work, and how facilities use AI, since faster tools don’t guarantee lighter workloads if productivity targets rise too. Clear assignment terms matter most when workload is the exact problem a facility is trying to cover.
How “Ted Lasso” Can Make You a Better Doctor
August 5, 2026 | MedCentral
A pediatric resident pulls three lessons from “Ted Lasso” for physicians starting training: stay curious, learn from mistakes without living in them, and keep enough confidence to continue growing. Beneath the TV framing is a straightforward point about medicine. Good clinical judgment develops through questions, repetition, reflection, and a willingness to admit what you don’t know.
Those habits travel well for locum providers, who routinely enter teams where local processes, personalities, and workflows are unfamiliar even when the medicine itself isn’t. Curiosity helps surface those differences before assumptions turn into errors, and moving on from a rough shift after extracting the lesson works the same way. A new assignment rewards the willingness to ask, listen, recalibrate, and improve without carrying every imperfect moment into the next facility.
Doctors’ Notes
What I Wish I Knew Before Choosing My Medical Specialty
August 4, 2026 | White Coat Investor
Specialty choice shapes far more than annual salary. Training length, debt accumulation, and how a field changes over a 30-year career can all alter the financial and professional outcome. Those choosing a specialty often see only a narrow version of it through academic training, since community practice can look very different.
Locum opportunities can give established clinicians a wider sample of how the same specialty operates across facilities, regions, and practice settings. A different call structure, patient mix, or level of autonomy can change how sustainable the work feels without changing specialties at all. Reassessing a career might have less to do with choosing the wrong field and more to do with not yet seeing enough versions of the right one.
The Best Physician Jobs Start With Location
July 21, 2026 | DocWire News
Location can change nearly every variable in a physician job, including malpractice costs, commute times, and access to the lifestyle a clinician wants outside of work. A recent analysis ranked Minneapolis-St. Paul highest overall for physicians across multiple specialties, based on factors like compensation and housing costs. A role that looks exceptional on paper can become a poor fit when geography adds an exhausting drive, distance from family, or an unsustainable cost structure.
Locums can test that variable more directly than most employed physicians, since short-term engagements offer firsthand information about a community, facility, and regional practice culture before any long commitment. Geography also affects assignment economics, since harder-to-staff markets can carry different rates and more negotiating leverage. Evaluating the job and the place together, rather than compensation in isolation, is what actually determines whether an assignment fits long term.
From ICU to Kickstarter: Creating a Board Game, with Dr. Lakshman Swamy
August 11, 2026 | YouTube
What started as a joke on social media turned into a fully funded Kickstarter campaign and a real board game for pulmonary and critical care physician Dr. Lakshman Swamy. On “Inside the Doctor’s Lounge,” host Dr. Nisha Mehta talks with Swamy about the creative process behind building Critical Care, the tabletop game that came out of that idea. Crowdfunding ended up validating the concept, building an audience, and reducing the financial risk of turning a passion project into an actual product.
Physicians often wrestle with perfectionism, and Swamy describes how embracing iteration, rather than waiting for an idea to feel finished, led to a stronger final product. Networking, collaboration, and finding the right team mattered just as much as the idea itself. Clinicians exploring a creative project on the side may recognize that same tension between wanting it perfect and simply getting started, along with the reminder that the right collaborators can be what actually moves an idea forward.
