Most healthcare facilities don't set out to work with ten different locums agencies. It happens gradually. A vacancy opens in one part of the anesthesia department, then another, and each time the fastest fix is calling whichever agency answers first. A year or two later, no one on staff can say with confidence who is covering what, at which rate, or under which terms.
That's not really a staffing problem. It's an administrative one, and it's more common than most people realize.
An average mid-sized hospital works with roughly ten locums vendors a year to cover somewhere between two and 10 anesthesia vacancies. Each of those vendors typically has its own point of contact for account management, invoicing, and credentialing. Multiply that out, and a hospital can end up managing hundreds of separate relationships just to keep an operating room staffed.
The obvious cost is the agency fee. The less obvious cost is everything that happens around it. When 10 agencies are all pulling from a similar candidate pool, rate disparity is almost guaranteed. One agency prices a clinician at an hourly, another vendor advising $20 more per hour—for what amounts to the same assignment. Without a shared reference point, there's no good way to know which number reflects the true market.
Invoicing follows the same pattern. Instead of one bill to review, a hospital finance team is reconciling invoices from ten different vendors, each formatted differently, each requiring its own audit against hours worked and rates agreed to. Privileging compounds it further. Ten agencies equals ten different documentation standards feeding into the same credentialing office, which slows down start dates and increases the odds of something being missed.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's the natural result of solving staffing gaps one vendor relationship at a time, instead of stepping back and managing the vendor pool as a whole.
The solution isn’t necessarily fewer locums. It’s a single point of contact who oversees the vendor relationships on the facility’s behalf. That means one team building a rate card that every vendor in the network operates within, so an assignment prices consistently regardless of which agency fills it. It means one consolidated invoice that's already been audited against the actual assignment terms, rather than ten invoices a finance team must untangle on its own. And it means one privileging process, built around a consistent set of documentation standards, instead of ten different versions of the same paperwork.
This kind of vendor management does not eliminate the need for multiple agencies. Larger organizations that lean heavily on locums will likely always need access to more than one vendor, simply because no single agency can staff every site at every moment.
What changes is who's doing the coordinating. Instead of a facility’s in-house team fielding calls from a dozen recruiters, one partner manages that network, negotiates on the facility’s behalf, and absorbs the administrative load that used to sit with facility staff.
The result isn't just cleaner paperwork. It's a clear picture of your overall locums spend, and the ability to see whether that spend is trending in the right direction. Such visibility is hard to get one vendor relationship at a time. It's far easier to reach with a single partner managing the entire network.
Looking to fill anesthesia vacancies at your facility? Let's talk about how BridgeCare can help.