Junior doctors are ditching their NHS jobs in favour of lucrative locum salaries before spreading the word on TikTok.
Medics in their 20s, fresh out of training, are leaving their posts in favour of temp work which can quadruple their health service earnings.
Locum work is becoming so popular that many young medics have become TikTok influencers – dubbed ‘medfluencers’ – telling followers how they can earn more money, work less, and go travelling by swapping an NHS contract for agency work.
In one video, Dr Lizkerry Odeh tells her 55,000 followers that ‘locum shifts are paid at significantly higher rates than the normal basic pay of a doctor in training’.
She stresses: ‘The big attraction of locum shifts is the pay. The pay is significantly better’, before adding she could earn more than three times a month more than regular junior doctor rates.
Dr Summer Kennedy, meanwhile, tells her 1,792 followers that her hourly rate ‘is so vastly different to the normal hourly rate it is crazy.’
She adds: ‘I now appreciate why people love the locum lifestyle because that is mad.’
Dr Monika Sharma, whose TikTok account trainwithdoctormon has almost 4,000 followers, says she became a locum GP after qualifying in August 2023 because it gave her ‘more autonomy’ over her time.
Under current rules, young doctors can locum in their first and second foundation years, when the NHS pays them annual salaries of between £32,398 and £37,303.
Contracted to work 48 hours a week, this breaks down to between £12.97 and £14.94 an hour.
Meanwhile, locum agencies offer anything between £25 and £60 an hour.
Bad pay has been blamed for putting off the doctors of tomorrow, after applications for medical degrees fell by 12 per cent.
The number of British 18-year-olds applying has dropped from 13,850 in 2022 to 12,100 this year, according to official figures.