This may confuse some due to my poor e-mail skills but I put my replies 
in with upper case for the first word of each sentence.


<<Lovely picture: is it copyright? ;->>
I'm not sure how much a locum in England earns (and where can I find 
something that links income after tax with cost of living and services - 
such as health and employer's pension contributions - provided/not 
provided?)

                  ROBBIE Coull used to have stuff about that--there was 
some stuff on his website www.coull.net tho I think he has now changed 
that to the website for his new practice in Charlottetown, PEI, Canada. 
Saw him just last week before I came home. He has managed to register 
something like 2,000 new patients in a matter of weeks. Ongoing shortage 
of family doctors out there.
He also had some info on same in his locum handbook name of which just 
escapes me right now.
As for locum earnings, well I think hiring a locum direct could be £500 
to 600 per day in a lot of places. I know when I do locum work via an 
agency in Essex, I get at least £400 a day plus accommodation plus 
mileage (from/to Stansted and on the job). Some busy days--because they 
pay well for extra work--I have earned up to £700.

Also, one of the medical mags does an annual survey of locum earnings in 
the four devolved bits of the UK.

 > have a job just like English GP, no on-call AT ALL, no hospital ,

This depends on the organisation of the health services locally - and 
don't forget that GPs in the UK pay 6% of basic practice income to avoid 
having every GP in the practice on 24hr call..

There are still areas - such as Highlands and Islands and the English 
equivalents - where if the GPs are not on 24/7 call, there is no primary 
care coverage.
Mind you, when I was in the USA, 24 hour coverage was a concept that was 
not understood: you went (own transport) to a hospital emergency room - 
and would be sent home to collect evidence of insurance before being seen.

               A BIT like that in Canada. And home visits during office 
hours are occasional and _never_ on demand, they are planned as part of 
ongoing care for someone with serious illnesses which cannot be dealt 
with by the home care nurses or specialist palliative care nurse. And 
the visit is booked out of surgery time, none of this ridiculous can you 
  just pop in when you're going for lunch and certainly none of the 
stuff I get in some practices where any more than one visit means no 
lunch break.

 > no nothing you don't want to do,

Things have changed in England since you emigrated!

 > take an hour off early as I did today

Er .. if you are a salaried GP (in English terms) do you make up the 
time at a different time and reach an agreement before this?
My practice manager - very reasonable and flexible - would be most 
unhappy if any of us just decided to walk out on surgeries without 
notice because the weather was good (or for any other reason!)
As a partner, I would be tempted to terminate your contract!

             AH BUT IT is not, if I understand this rightly, anything 
like the penal servitude that is salaried practice in parts of mainland 
England. It is more like my work in Canada where I bill by the hour for 
all relevant work which ranges from seeing patients to dealing with 
necessary paperwork, lab results, etc the odd meeting.
So if I decide on a Thursday, shit no, I need to go somewhere Friday, I 
cancel my Friday surgery. My staff would _like_ me to give them a decent 
bit of notice but at the end of the day I am the guy doing the surgery 
and it is up to me.

The big difference, Mary, is that in Canada and I think down under also, 
there is not this enormous elephant-sized bone crushing expectation that 
patients on the list _have_ to be seen in the practice on request. Ok 
you can put in wait times for non-urgent, appointment within x 
hours/days with someone in the practice if urgent etc etc but it is all 
part of the same mind set.

That the patient is on the list and therefore must be seen.

It is not like that in Canada where I do locums. If there are no 
suitable appointments available the patient makes his choice---he can 
wait, he can decide it doesn't matter and sort it himself, he can go to 
the pharmacy, he can talk to family friend neighbour local nurse 
whatever, he can go to a walk in clinic, he can go and join the line up 
at emerg.
Basically it is not the practice responsibility to sort him out at all 
costs.

 > as it was a bit warm out, and earn almost as much as a full-time 
locum back in Blighty. I do as much as I feel like, no responsibility as 
I work for someone else,

Are we supposed to sympathise with the someone else?
My practice employs locums - and we do expect responsibly within 
contractual job roles... >>

AH! THE SOMEONE ELSE!  Does my long spiel about the lack of 
patient-must-be-seen mind set help at all? Bear in mind that there is 
often plenty of money involved in other places--eg if the local 
pharmacist where I just came back from, who organises a weekly walk in 
clinic in the health centre, cannot get docs for the walk in or patients 
don't turn up, he loses out. Some places he makes on the rent as well as 
prescriptions, other places he just makes on the prescriptions. 
Prescribing profits are way removed from government control compared to 
the UK.
And regarding responsibility, it is a different type of responsibility. 
I have always found that I take on far more difficult clinical stuff out 
there compared to the UK. Part of it is having time, having access to 
investigations (digital x-ray viewing on the computer, radiologist on 
the end of the phone, ditto other specialists, all happy to talk to mere 
GPs), part of it is a different medical establishment attitude to GPs. 
Many GPs do hospital rounds every morning so that maybe helps a bit to 
ensure that specialists see them and respect their abilities.

So I think the responsiblity is at a much higher level on the clinical 
care and individual patient level. There is much less responsibility for 
providing an all day service on demand/request because of the factors I 
noted above.

It suits me to work that way. At home in NI or England, I get frustrated 
because for multiple reasons I cannot use all my skills and I do not 
have time to sort out complicated patients.

Declan