What matters to our clients in private practice?

The Business of Psychology

What matters to our clients in private practice?

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Business of Psychology and welcome to the new season. I'm really excited to be doing a new series of the podcast and we're kicking off with three episodes that are all about getting more clients into your practice or getting those first few clients, and what it takes in the modern setting to do that, because what I'm hearing a lot from people is that it feels like things have changed and that the industry is starting to change.

I think there's an awful lot of positive change going on in our industry at the moment. I think that people are more interested and positive about mental well being than they ever have been before, and I think that they are far more likely now to invest in looking after themselves in terms of their mental health than they ever have been before.

But there are also some difficulties in the industry at the moment. Not least, the difficulties caused by the wider economic climate, and I'm really aware of that. So in these next three episodes of the podcast, we're going to be talking about what we can do to make sure that we're running our businesses in the most effective and efficient way in this new climate, and that means not spending hours and hours on marketing, but really focusing on the stuff that is going to make a big impact.

Full show notes of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links & References:

6 Ways to Use Google Trends for Marketing (Hubspot)

The aspects of healthcare quality that are important to health professionals and patients: A qualitative study (Science Direct)

New Survey Asks: What Do Patients Want Most in a Doctor? (Everyday Health)

Measuring patient experience in healthcare (Science Direct)

Start & Grow: The Complete Course for Psychologists and Therapists - Psychology Business School

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

What patients or clients want from us in private mental health services and how this might have changed

In this episode, we're going to consider why potential clients look to private practice in the first place, and what aspects of the experience of private practice are actually important to them when they reach us, because I'm a firm believer that business and marketing decisions should always be made with a client first mindset. That's actually what marketing means; marketing is actually the practice of putting the client's needs and desires at the forefront of business strategy. It's not about persuading people to buy stuff at all, it's about creating stuff that people naturally want, whether that's to purchase our paid for services, or whether that’s services that they want to use in the public or the third sector.

Now, in order to achieve that, we have to get to know our clients inside out and give them the best possible experience and the most effective path from where they are now to where they want to be. And this episode is going to give us some research based pointers as to where our focus should be going forward.

Why do people come to us in private practice?

Unsurprisingly, there isn't much data to tell us about this. However, MIND gives a useful summary on their website, and MIND state it quite clearly; it's because people can't get the service that they want or need in the NHS (in the UK anyway), or they find the waiting time for the NHS service unacceptable, or they want the added confidentiality the private sector can offer, for example, travelling to a location where they're not going to meet people they know or choosing a completely online service.

One thing I'd add into that is often people come to the private sector because they want the efficiency that we can offer. So maybe they're very, very busy, they don't want to change their working pattern, and they want a therapist that can fit in with that. And we know that is just not the way that the NHS works. So understanding these motivations gives us an important clue as to what kind of services will work in the private sector, and what's not going to work in the private sector.

When you're starting out in private practice, it's a really good idea to do some research about what NHS services have long waiting times around you. What are the particular needs in your local community? You can then consider whether your specialism is likely to be in demand where you are. To be honest, I think in most areas, pretty much all specialisms are needed in the private sector at the moment because we're seeing long waiting times, but you will find that there are certain areas which are easier than others.

Google Trends data can actually give you an idea of what services are being searched for near you. I did a Google Trends search for the UK nationally (you can narrow it down further than that) and I noticed that neurodiversity related services, especially diagnostic services for ADHD and autism in children, are getting more interest than any other mental health related keywords on Google in the UK. The growth over the past year for those search terms has been absolutely phenomenal, and search terms relating to children also remain extremely high, which is a trend we've seen developing over the last few years.

So if you aren't sure what services to offer or what your focus should be in your private practice at the moment, and maybe you've got a wide range of experience and you could choose to specialise in a few different areas, I'd really encourage you to look at those local trends.

Look on Google trends relating to those specialist areas and see what is being searched for now, but also get out into your community, talk to other professionals. What are the services that they are needing to refer out to at the moment? Because that will tell you where you're going to find the easiest to target.

One thing that I also noticed when I dived down the Google trends rabbit hole was that ‘autistic child’ was trending with more than 70% more searches for this term, in the past 12 months than in the previous 12 months. So I clicked to explore this a bit further and found that searches for toys for autistic seven year olds, and other age related categories too, like four year olds, five year olds, etc., had increased by over 5000%. So if doing work with autistic children was my specialty, I would be thinking about writing content about toys that are beneficial for autistic children, because that is being searched for, it's something people are really interested in. If I was looking for a ‘more than therapy’ activity, which I wanted to add into my business, then I might be thinking about creating something play based for autistic children that would also have a therapeutic benefit, because we can see there that this is a growing trend that people are interested in this topic and they're getting more interested in it. So that's something that I'd be considering.

If you aren't sure how to use Google Trends, then just Google it! There are a ton of helpful articles. I've linked to one in the show notes from HubSpot, which will give you a steer on how you can start using Google Trends to look at what might be needed and necessary in your area of specialty and in your local area too.

Also do bear in mind that if we know that people are accessing your services because they want confidentiality, or they don't want the NHS waiting list, or they're seeking efficiency around their working patterns, then we also know that they're the kind of people that are likely to really care about and expect good customer service.

This should be a really key priority for all of us, but it often gets forgotten, especially when we're busy and all of our previous experience has been in the public sector where sadly the customer experience is often very far down the list of priorities.

What aspects of the experience of coming for private practice therapy are actually important to our clients?

Turning to the recent literature, what do studies tell us potential clients find important when accessing our services? Well, I really wish that I could tell you that there were tons of mental health specific papers from recent years, but actually to find recent, post pandemic offerings about this subject, I've had to dive into the general healthcare space. Thankfully there are a lot of transferable conclusions there and there's actually been quite a bit of research done. Hannawa et al. from 2022 did a study of patient perception of healthcare quality and found that strong communication amongst staff, so amongst staff teams, but also with patients care and carers, and perception of staff motivation, prioritisation of outcomes held to be important by patients, and strong systems and processes, including admin processes, were all very important to patients, as was feeling confident that staff knew enough about their condition.

Now, these things sound really basic. We might think we should take it for granted that there needs to be good communication within our team, that there has to be good communication with our clients and with the important people in their lives. We might think it sounds really basic that we should know enough about their conditions to make them feel confident in us as clinicians, and it might sound basic that admin processes need to be slick and robust and help people to feel confident, but actually, to achieve that in private practice, we have to work really, really hard.

It's very easy for things to come across as a bit chaotic when you're a solo practitioner. I've talked a lot on this podcast about how difficult I find the admin side of things, and I've got advantages of having people on my team to help me and having been in practice now for quite a number of years. When I first started out, I'm sure my clients didn't feel that my admin processes were secure and slick. I hope that my communication with them was good, but actually if it's taking you a couple of days to reply to emails, which would be very normal and very understandable as a solo practitioner, maybe they don't feel that communication is that good.

Thinking about what you can do to improve those things in your practice is really, really important. That might include investing in help from a virtual assistant so that the inbox is covered when you're not in the office, but even if it doesn't, or if you've already got a virtual assistant, thinking about those standard operating procedures and how you can improve them in order to ensure that there's always space for that compassionate communication and that people feel supported and held by your service, rather than like they're constantly battling through difficult payment terms, struggling to work out your admin processes and booking systems.

On top of that, there was a recent survey from Everyday Health in the States, which also shed some interesting light on this topic. When they asked what qualities patients most wanted in a doctor, active listening, clinical experience, compassion, empathy, easy access to the doctor, and sensitivity and inclusivity were top of the list. Answers varied slightly by race, and the results are very interesting from that perspective, indicating that sensitivity to racial differences was very important to the black community surveyed, and on a bit of a side note, I speak to many clinicians in independent practice who are motivated to set up precisely to do this for their clients. So I think if that's you and you have knowledge of a particularly marginalised group, then speak about that in your marketing, because this is something that this research, and also our anecdotal evidence as independent practitioners, tells us people are looking for and it is really important. It's highly valued by those people.

Later in this series I will be interviewing Kim from Kaemotherapy, who came in and did our Race in Therapy training in my membership community recently. I'm going to be interviewing Kim about her experience empowering therapists to bring race into the therapy room, because we know this is something that really matters and that there isn't enough of in our public services. So it's something that we should be seeking to provide in independent practice.

I think we can also take from this that the compassion and empathy piece is really important. I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably strong on the active listening skills, that is what we do after all, and clinical experience, again, you're likely to have that in spades, but it's actually really easy to forget about compassion and empathy at every stage of the journey. I've got no doubt at all that you are infusing compassion and empathy into your clinical work, because again, it's part of what we do, and when that goes missing from our work, then it's usually a sign that things are going pretty wrong for us. But is there compassion and empathy in the way that you book your clients in? Is there compassion and empathy in the way that you communicate? If somebody doesn't show up for an appointment, all of those admin processes that might feel like the boring stuff, we can infuse all of those with the way we want our clients to feel when they interact with us. Knowing that this is a high priority for people tells us something about how important that needs to be in all of our marketing, from everything somebody reads on our website, to the way that our virtual assistant communicates with them, the way that our invoices are delivered. Everything needs to be infused with that compassion and sensitivity.

I've linked to that survey in the show notes if you're interested in diving more into their findings. I have linked to all the studies I'm mentioning today, so that you can find out a bit more about how they were conducted and dive into what those outcomes might mean for your practice.

I was also really interested in what research there might be about patient experience and outcomes such as perception of well being in healthcare and how those might be improved by the environment and the overall experience. Because as a psychologist, I know that environmental triggers can be extremely important.

Maksim Godovykh and Abraham Pizam in a very recently published paper review some of the known impacts of paying attention to customer experience at every stage, and it is really fascinating. Particularly, they find that there are some really tangible outcome benefits to creating a nicer environment for people where they feel more comfortable and it's more similar to a kind of hospitality setting than a very clinical hospital based feel. In addition to that review, they also did some research about the measures that people are using for patient experience, and they call for a more holistic measurement system, including measures of interactions, perceptions, affect, and outcomes in order to fully encapsulate the true impact of environmental factors and the tweaks, the customer journey that we might make. So I think that's a really good read, and if you're thinking about how you might evaluate the impact of additions that you make to your practice, or maybe you're thinking about changing part of your customer experience, maybe moving to a different location or using a different online platform, then it's really important to measure the impact of these things. So I'd recommend having a look at their paper (I've linked to it in the show notes) to get an idea of what kind of outcome measures you might want to use.

Now, some of them you're not going to be able to use, and I did struggle a little bit to imagine who would be able to use some of them, because they're recommending things like we should be looking at pupil dilation to tell how much pleasure something brings somebody. I don't think we can do that, not in our settings anyway. But thinking about how we might bring in some outcome measures that tell us about how people are interacting with us, what their perceptions are of our services, how our services make them feel, and then how that goes on to impact their implementation of what they learn in therapy and how their lives might look different at the end of it, I do think we can take something from that and work that into the way we're measuring the impact of our private practices. So I think it's really important.

Despite the fact we clearly need more evidence to guide us in understanding what's important to our clients and potential clients' experience, what is clear from all of this research is that we need to take a patient first approach or a client first approach to building and marketing our practices, putting the needs of potential clients in the driving seat. Because if we don't know what our client's particular needs and desires are, then we're just guessing. For me, this starts by being really clear about who you're trying to help so that you can plan a customer journey that covers everything up to the moment that they're telling friends and family about how great it was to work with you.

It's all about delivering compassionate service from the beginning to the end, and we're going to talk more about that in this series, so I hope you'll join us for the rest of these special episodes of the Business of Psychology and for the rest of the series. I'm really excited about some of the interviews I've got lined up for you, and also some of the research based industry trends I'm going to be sharing this series. So thank you for joining us.

Mentioned in this episode:

Start and Grow

Before you go, did you know that I have a course for professionals just like you who are starting out in independent practice? In fact, my Start and Grow course has already supported hundreds of psychologists and therapists to build impactful, financially rewarding, and professionally fulfilling practices. When you sign up to the course, you get clear step-by-step support to build a practice that supports your values and rewards your hard work through our comprehensive online learning modules. You get peace of mind, thanks to our complete suite of legal documents from Clare Veal at Aubergine Legal, you get 12 months of membership to our supportive student community, access to our private students' podcast, so you can learn in your own time and in your own way. You, yes, I see you learning while you're doing the washing up! And you get access to regular group coaching sessions with me and the rest of our lovely students. If that sounds like exactly what you need to get out of private practice paralysis, then sign up today at...