Hello and welcome to Lunch Lessons with the GURU! In today’s blog I’m trying something different. You have the option to read the blog or watch my video blog on YouTube.
Here’s the video blog:
Because I know you may like to read instead of watching the video version, here’s a blog about holiday scheduling I wrote just for you!
Today I want to talk about the holiday scheduling.
Have you ever noticed how people start talking about how busy they are right around the holidays? How it feels like there’s never enough time to get things done. The new year feels like it’s looming and so much has to happen before it gets here?
This is common for most of us, feeling too busy, having too much to do, and never having enough time.
But this doesn’t just affect us on the personal side, it can also affect our practices and carry over to patient care.
When patients begin to feel the holiday pressure, they want to decrease their visits around the holidays and often throw out excuses for why they can’t schedule. Too many events, too many things to think about, and not enough time. Or, even worse, they want to same-day cancel at the last minute.
And having to deal with more excuses and possibly feeling a bit stressed and overwhelmed around the holidays, our front office team members start to go along with the patients’ excuses for why they can’t get it for care.
Holiday scheduling gets chaotic and your organized schedule goes down the drain.
Have a holiday scheduling policy
We have a policy in our clinic. Patient visits per week should stay the same during the holiday season. In fact, the goal is that we continue to expand right into the new year.
But how do you prevent common patient objections to holiday scheduling? Well, first, you need to understand that as a person’s perception of ‘busy-ness’ increases, they start to feel all 168 hours in the week crushing them. They feel the pressure of their busy schedule, making them feel like they can’t take on any more in their lives, at least during the holidays.
And what’s the first thing they cut out? SELF CARE. Which we all know is the absolute worst thing someone should remove from their priorities.
Since we all really want our patients to reach recovery, each team member needs to realize that we can’t allow it to be ok for a patient to stop coming or decrease care just because of the holidays or the feeling of being too busy.
Because when that happens, when patients pause or decrease care which often makes them go MIA, that leads to them dropping out AND AN INCREASE IN UNSUCCESSFUL DISCHARGES.
And then there’s no chance they’ll recover.
But along with understanding why this happens and recognizing when it’s happening, you want your team to know how to handle holiday scheduling – how to prevent scheduling roadblocks or same-day cancellations from now right into the new year.
It’s actually pretty simple.
As they’re scheduling patients over the following weeks of the holidays, make sure your Patient Care Coordinators know how to recognize and handle patients who are feeling the holiday pressure.
When they recognize that a patient is feeling overwhelmed, instead of going along with it and allowing them to decrease care during the holidays, they just need to use this simple script to help the patient find just one hour.
“I understand. You’re feeling busy, and a bit overwhelmed.”
Next, we have to handle the patient, and this script has been super helpful for my team during holiday scheduling:
“Let’s do this. Let’s find ONE hour next week where we can get you in for the care that you need and deserve in order to recover. I have {now offer a day and times]”
Once they have the patient’s agreement for that one hour, they work to find one more.
When they take this approach with patients who are feeling like they’re too busy, it takes away the pressures of the entire week and allows them to focus on just one hour where they can get the care they need.
I HOPE YOU LIKED THIS LUNCH LESSON ABOUT HOLIDAY SCHEDULING WITH THE GURU.
You can follow my Facebook page for more tips from the GURU. Here’s one tip about why you should provide consistent front desk training.
Wishing you the best today and always!
Dee
