While working with practices, we find that most practices (sole or group) accept a level of private practice wastage. This wastage can include clients who miss their first appointments through to clients who disengage before the clinician feels they should.
Today, we talk about ways to get a commitment from your client in a way that reduces reschedules and cancellations.
If you have read our post on Private Practice Wastage, you'll recall our "guesstimate" of 34 minutes of administration time per week on reschedules and cancellations. Alongside that article, we spoke about ways your reception team could assist in this reduction in our Client Enquiries: Receptionist Engagement post.
If we take a stance and change our mindset, we'll find that we can increase our client engagement and decrease our acceptable wastage with a few simple workflow processes.
1. Have a clear conversation with the client within the first three sessions that provides an understanding of the client journey. When we offer an understanding of what the journey looks like, clients can make informed decisions about their therapeutic path.
2. Stand by your boundaries. If a client doesn't attend an appointment, charge their credit card for the missed appointment. If you make excuses for your clients, they will assume missing appointments is acceptable.
3. Book future appointments. Someone once said, consistency is the key, so apply this to your client's appointments. If Friday at 8:00 am works for someone, give them that time! It's easier to remember every Friday I have an appointment as opposed to this week I have a 2:00 pm on Tuesday, next week it's 3:00 pm on Wednesday and the week after it's a 10:00 am on Monday.
4. Ensure you have the perfect number of clients on your caseload. Think of a cup filled to the brim, not overflowing and not under full. When you actively follow up with your clients, you are not carrying a caseload that is too big. This way you'll work smarter (because how much hard work is a new client?) and you carry a clinical responsibility that you can manage.
You are reading part five of our 11 part series around client engagement. Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don't miss any of the series.
