You want your practice or clinic to be efficient and consistently deliver great service, right?
We’re talking great service to everyone, of course, to your patients or clients, but also in the form of support to your practitioners, nurses, admin team members, practice owners and community stakeholders.
Getting this happening really is achievable. It comes down to having clear documentation – Policies, Procedures, Flowcharts, Checklists, Templates, Handouts and Reports.
Achieving results
For one of our clients, when we established a simple ‘Start of Day Checklist’ for their reception team the results were nothing short of miraculous. Previously each staff opening the practice on different days did things differently, including leaving out essential steps… There were accusations of laziness between team members, inconsistent service to patients, doctors’ needs not being met, extra work for the Practice Manager putting out fires and managing performance, and general discontent within the team.
The Start of Day Checklist we created clearly stated the essential steps needed, from turning off the alarm, to setting up the waiting room, consulting rooms and reception area and right down to filling and boiling the kettle.
It was printed and laminated, and the team were trained to work their way through it from start to finish. They ticked the boxes and then wiped it clean at the end of the day, ready for the next. There was also a Procedure they could refer to for further information and when training a new team member, but the Checklist itself had minimal detail and was easy to follow.
We won’t go into a full list of benefits the client experienced (there were way too many!), but some were:
A calm practice that was ready for patients when they arrived.
Happier team members – everyone knew what they needed to do and did it.
Doctors who had everything they needed ready for their session and felt well supported.
Efficient and consistent service to patients.
And far less firefighting for the Practice Manager!
All this from one simple checklist.
For tips on creating your own powerful checklists, check out our article, “The Power of the Checklist”.
Other benefits of great documentation
You can see that we’re pretty passionate about getting documentation developed and embedded 😊. This is because we’ve witnessed so many huge gains for practices, like those in the example above.
Here are some more to really convince you why it’s worth the effort to create documents for your team and practice.
Good documentation:
Establishes clear guidelines for service quality, behaviour, actions etc.
Embeds the Purpose & Values across the organisation.
Results in increased team member job satisfaction, motivation and performance – they know what’s required of them and how to achieve it, plus are more efficient and supported in their time management.
Drives higher standards of service delivery and greater clarity for patients – they also know what’s needed from and expected of them.
Ensures everyone in the organisation is working on the same information and therefore achieves consistency across team members’ work.
Enables control over processes and how things are done.
Creates an objective measure of performance, enabling performance-based advancement or management where applicable.
Underpins risk management – no one is indispensable if things are written down, plus people can take holidays without things being missed.
Makes for easier induction of new team members and less time spent getting them up to speed and indoctrinated into the organisational culture.
Improves training roll-out.
Improves financial performance and underpins growth and expansion.
Creates scope for the practice owner/s and managers to step back more from the day-to-day – particularly as more documentation is added and there are fewer questions and errors/issues to address.
Facilitates legal and standards compliance (such as with privacy legislation and accreditation requirements).
Makes for a scalable and/or saleable organisation – it’s not dependent on specific individuals to succeed.
And there are so many more!
Okay, you’re convinced, but developing all that documentation seems like a lot of work…
We understand this is how you might be feeling!
Initially, it might be, but if you can get into the habit of scheduling a regular time to sit down and revisit the above areas of your practice and create documents accordingly, it will save you time and headspace in the future. Plus, you don’t have to do it all at once. Just start with the documents that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Once you nail the creation of the documentation, the next step is to train some of your team members to draft items - delegation and upskilling at the same time!
If you’re not sure where to start, check out our “How-to of Policies & Procedures” article. It steps you through how to work out which items of documentation matter most for your practice.
Then, our downloadable Policy & Procedure Template makes writing these easy, and our FREE example Quality & Collaboration Policy shows the template in use.
If you need more help to get started, or maybe review what you have to make it more effective from an operations perspective, the team at Augmentum provides a broad range of services to Medical and Allied Health organisations, including documentation development, and building effective and efficient foundations and teams. We also provide assistance to healthcare business owners and decision-makers in other areas, such as strategic development and planning, customer engagement and retention, and establishing reports to keep their finger on the pulse and drive growth and success. Get in touch to find out more, or check out our website www.augmentum.com.au
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