Taking a locum placement at Causeway Hospital? Here's where to actually live.
The rota gets covered in a fortnight. Where you are going to live for the next three months is left entirely to you — usually at short notice, on a coast you may never have driven. This is the part nobody briefs you on.
Start with the drive, not the postcode
Causeway Hospital sits on Newbridge Road, on the edge of Coleraine, BT52 1HS. The useful thing about the North Coast is that everything is close together — six towns worth living in, all inside twenty minutes of the front door. The less useful thing is that the roads between them are rural, largely unlit, and take weather badly. Ten minutes on the A2 coming off a night shift in January is not the same ten minutes it was in June.
Roughly what you are choosing between:
- Coleraine — about 5 minutes. Closest and most practical. Supermarkets, the train station, everything open year-round. Least like a holiday.
- Portstewart — about 10 minutes. The promenade and the Strand, genuinely walkable, and the best balance of quiet and convenient.
- Castlerock — about 12 minutes. The quietest of them. Beach at the end of the road and its own railway station.
- Portrush — about 12 minutes. The busiest, and much the best served for food and company. Swings hard between summer and winter.
- Portballintrae & Bushmills — about 20 minutes. Village life, and the Giant's Causeway on your days off.
If you would rather not run a car, it is possible but tight. The Coleraine–Portrush line runs hourly with halts at University and Dhu Varren, and Castlerock sits on the Belfast–Derry line with a change at Coleraine. For a normal working week that is fine. For shifts finishing at eight in the evening, you will want the car.
Your four options, honestly
Trust or hospital accommodation. Ask your agency about this first, before anything else. If on-site or trust-managed accommodation is available for your post it is usually the cheapest and closest thing you will find, and people routinely fail to ask. Do not assume it exists, and do not assume it does not.
A hotel. Fine for a fortnight. Over three months it becomes expensive and quietly wearing — no kitchen when you finish at two in the morning, no washing machine, and corridor noise at exactly the hours you are trying to sleep through daylight.
A private rental. Cheapest per month on paper, and the worst fit in practice. Almost everything on this coast is offered on twelve months with a deposit, a credit check and an unfurnished start. You would be setting up and closing utility accounts for a job that finishes in March.
A furnished short-let. Furnished, bills on, no deposit, month to month. More than a private rental, less than a hotel. This is what we do — and it is worth saying that it is not right for everyone. If your placement genuinely runs a full year, a letting agent will look after you better than we can, and we will tell you so.
The season matters more than you would think
This is a holiday coast, and that shapes everything about finding somewhere to live on it. Through July and August the whole place is booked out and priced for holidaymakers. If your placement starts in the summer, sort accommodation the week you accept it, not the week before you travel.
From October through to March it is the opposite. The coast empties, availability is wide open, and almost everyone becomes more flexible on length of stay. If you have any say at all over when a placement starts, a winter post on the North Coast is far easier to house than a summer one — and you get Portstewart Strand in February with nobody on it, which is arguably the better version anyway.
Working at Causeway Hospital?
We keep furnished homes across Coleraine, Portstewart, Portrush, Castlerock and Bushmills for locum doctors, nurses and allied health professionals on placement. Bills included, no deposit, no tenancy agreement. Tell us your dates and we will tell you what is genuinely free.
See locum accommodation