Following on from yesterdays blog, I want to highlight one or two things that we’re going to be talking about on the master class next week, just as a point of discussion and for information.
If you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of someone attending a new clinician, whom they’ve never seen before, with a problem they have and with the anxieties that surround that, both in terms of operation procedures and cost. Imagine what it feels like sat in the waiting room.
If you can’t then book yourself a private consultation appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon when you actually have a problem.
The way you meet that patient for the very first time is absolutely fundamental to your future relationship and the worst way you can do that is to send someone to reception to bring them in to your lair, while you're sat there waiting.
There is much you can do to examine how much empathy is lost and how much trust has eroded by that first interaction but calling in a patient yourself from the waiting room is fundamental to success in building a relationship that lasts.
Ridiculous as this seems, it’s clinically and scientifically proven to be true (and born out massively in our practice).
How you introduce yourself to the patient, how you introduce your nurse and your team and what you talk about for the first 10 minutes completely and utterly effects the tone.
While everyone would like to delegate everything to everybody else, in the hope that they never have to do anything, there are clearly some absolutely fundamental parts of your work that have to be carried out by you and the first stage of a consultation is exactly that.
This is the first 15 minutes and it’s why a consultation can’t be 30 minutes because 15 minutes after the first 15 minutes isn’t long enough to get through a consultation where a patient trusts you.
It’s why free consultation are rubbish because you don’t value them and you want the patient in and out as quickly as possible and signed up at the end.
A consultation isn’t about signing a patient up at the end, it’s about building trust to an individual so that they will happily come back to see you when they’re ready and so will their family and so will their friends and therefore you will win.
The first stage to that is being arsed to call a patient in yourself.
Blog Post Number - 2743
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