AHP’s – It’s Time to Take Control
The price gouging rhetoric refuses to go away while at the same time businesses are finding it harder than ever to keep their doors open. The increasing cost of living alongside the insane salary pressures resulting from the significant workforce shortage is leaving business owners feeling exhausted and dare I say it, a little defeated.
Allied Health business owners are finding their inner warriors and are now seeking solutions – especially an end to the narrative that the NDIS is overpaying for therapy services. It’s so easy to respond to this in a defensive way, explaining the cost of doing business and the endless non- client facing administration that the NDIS brings with it alongside the inability to build these costs into the capped hourly rate – but is there a better way?
Let’s consider what might happen if all of us made a shift in how we, as an Allied Health sector, message to our teams, our clients and the community. What if instead of talking about the FEATURES of therapy, we talked about the BENEFITS?
Take a look at your website. What does it say about the value of your services? What will your clients expect in terms of BENEFIT?
To my mind, the most obvious way to do this is to be recording and publishing (de-identified of course!) our outcome measures results – why not make your business accountable for great goal setting and measuring of progress of your clients? Why not contribute to the evidence base? Build a system for the simplified capture of this data – and then share it with the world.
Suddenly, we have a public facing strengths based narrative based on fact. Allied health intervention, when done well, supports people to live the life of their choosing and ultimately stands to save both state / territory and federal governments money in the medium to long term.
Next, let’s consider the language that we are using. Is it framed around value and benefit? Is it strong and positive and solution focused?
A quick glance at Word Hippo provides dozens of strong words similar to ‘value’ and ‘benefit’. How many of these are represented in your strategic plan, in your business plan, in performance appraisals, in the client facing documentation?
Embed this language within your business. Take control of the messages that are being used in the public space.
There are thousands of us and together we can have a very large voice.
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