Continuing with the theme of the past few weeks let’s look at another of the key distinctions of sustainable practices and identify a few suggestions for you to implement in your practice if this is an issue for you.
The sustainable practice is a practice that functions as if it’s on ‘rails’. Things happen smoothly, everyone knows their role, they perform them impeccably, there are no ‘fires’ to put and all team members are able to cover for each other.
Now, I know that systems and procedures can be a very boring subject for many chiropractors but we must acknowledge that it is the systems and procedures that allow us the freedom to serve lots of people and get amazing results.
At a clinical level, observe any great chiropractor and they will have a specific protocol of procedures that they go through with every practice member. On the other hand an unsustainable chiropractor will be all over the place with his/her practice member care doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that and trying to be everything to everyone – a jack of all trades, as the saying goes.
Make sure that you have a system and a protocol for everything that you do both clinically and administratively. This enables others to duplicate your work and provides consistency of results.
The document that provides this order to your practice is the Office Policy and Procedures Manual. If you don’t have an Office Policy and Procedures Manual then commit to creating one today. If you need a hand getting one together then get the template in our Products area of the website.
Whilst systems and procedures don’t create sustainable practices, practices will not be sustainable without them.
