Cancellations have been damaging veterinary locum work for years. No-one was keeping count. Now, Ronda is.
The hidden cost of a last-minute cancellation
A last-minute cancellation costs a locum a full day’s income. For a practice, it means scrambling for cover at 7am, a collapsing list, and patients turned away.
Until now, there has been no way to track it across the UK veterinary locum sector.
Now, the team here at Ronda have changed that by introducing a reciprocal reliability rating – allowing practices to see, for the first time, how often a locum has cancelled shifts and with how much notice. And locums can see the same about practices.
How the reliability score works
The score appears publicly on every profile, calculated using a standardised penalty points model:
- Notice given: 14+ days before shift; Penalty points: 0.5 points
- Notice given: Less than 24 hours (or no-show); Penalty points: 5 points
Example: A locum with 12 confirmed shifts and two cancellations (at nine days and three days) receives a score of 75 per cent – which improves with each completed shift.
Reciprocal and regenerative ratings
The same logic applies to practices. Cancel a confirmed shift with less than 24 hours’ notice? Same penalty points. The score recovers over time as more shifts are honoured.
Exceptional circumstances (illness, emergency) can be reviewed by the support team. The score is not designed to permanently penalise anyone for isolated incidents.
Transparency that benefits the whole profession
Unlike traditional review-based systems, Ronda’s reliability rate removes guesswork. Practices can rule out a pattern of late cancellations before accepting a booking. Locums can see which practices have a history of short-notice cancellations – a direct cause of lost income and wasted diary time.
As the dataset grows, Ronda expects to publish the first industry-wide benchmarks on locum cancellation rates in the UK.
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