[imaginegenerous]

Never done locuming but as a permanent have the benefits of company pension if I want, just under 40k a year, my branch doesn't open on Bank Holidays so I have all those in addition to 5 weeks holiday. This is for 40 hours Mon-Thurs plus 7.5 hours every other Saturday. The downsides as I see them (in my current job) are: we're open and trading for the full 10 hours a day so getting a break at lunchtime can be difficult although I do try to take about 15 minutes to get a 'mental break' (area manager thinks 20 minutes is more than enough) and I'm supposed to be in the pharmacy at all times - we only have a small staff area out the back and the door doesn't shut so you never really get away from it. The other major things is high fairly high MUR targets - ours is 6 a week; we get an e-mail to say how all the branches in our area are doing at least once a day - I manage 3 if I'm lucky! And the number of weekly dosette boxes we do - at the moment we have 46 a week - I seem to find it a major struggle to fit in checking them, doing MURs, dealing with customer questions etc and checking the day-to-day scripts but maybe that's just me! We do about 10,000 items a month, one pharmacist on duty and we don't have an ACT at present (and don't look like getting one either). Area manager wants more MURs, more dosette patients and more items and average waiting times of less than 10 minutes for 75%+ of customers.

But there is a certain amount of job security and I guess different companies ouwld opperate slightly differently - some better than others.