Starting out in private practice - advice and tips please!

[quitefrankey]

My immediate concern for you would be the lack of experience. You have been qualified for 18 months & have just 10 months of NHS working experience. In private practice you really are alone & need to have the clinical reasoning, skills & expertise to work confidently & independently with anything that you may encounter. Patients expectations are often higher in private practice than they are in an NHS environment. In addition, some private health insurance companies will not allow you to treat their patients with less than 5 years experience, most notably BUPA. As far as I know AXA PPP are still not recruiting physiotherapists to their register (this has been the case for several years) so you are currently unable to treat patients from the 2 largest insurance providers. This means you are limited from the outset, & as you plan to start on a domiciliary basis your target patients are those that can pay for themselves (there are further difficulties in getting health insurers to pay for domiciliary visits). In my experience self-payers make up approximately 20-30% of an established clinic patient base. So you will be competing with established local clinics who are fully equipped - you need to be offering something different / special or be particularly competitive in your pricing to attract your first patients. Working in the community is also much more time consuming so the number of patients you can see each day is considerably less than in a clinic. And you will need to advertise, advertise, advertise.

Consider perhaps renting a room on a hourly basis within a gym/sports club or complementary health centre so that you only pay for the time that you are using the room. And I would suggest that you ask your patients to give brief written feedback at the end of treatment that you can use within your advertising, & encourage recommendations by handing a few business cards to each patient.

I'm sorry if my view is rather negative as I understand & respect your desire to be working & using your skills, & the difficulties you (& so many others) have encountered in the job market in this climate. You have clearly done a lot of groundwork & if your heart tells you to go for it, then do it! I wish you the very best of luck.

[violablue]

A website, so people can look you up and find you easily. I'm not sure about practice regulations your way, so I won't comment on any of that. But a website is a great way to advertise yourself.

[jools987]

18 months ago. I did pretty much what you're proposing. I qualified in 2005 and was unable to get a junior post. I did a small amount of bank work and then departed physiotherapy for a while to do other stuff and have a baby. Post-baby, I decided that being self-employed was an ideal way to work, despite (I felt) my lack of experience. I did a full-time 5 week course in Sports Therapy to get me back into something related and did a couple of weeks shadowing at an NHS out-patient department. I rented a room from the outset as I'd guessed about the drawbacks (hightlighted by quitefrankey) of working mobile. I guess I was lucky to start with in that I needed to do little more than cover my costs and childcare. My business has grown very slowly but I'm now seeing up to 15 patients a week, all self-referring, no insurance work for the reasons also hightlighted by quitefrankey. My physio skills are basic, I'll admit, but they are there, and they're complimented by massage and soft tissue work, something which I feel is vital and missing from many physio's approach. It's scary working on your own with little experience but I recommend sticking to what you know, read read read learn learn learn (fear of messing up and the responsibility is a great motivator I've discovered!) and follow your instincts. My business (I rent a room within an existing business in the centre of a small semi-rural town) comes mainly from my website which is simple and searches reasonably well, and from word of mouth. I've spent almost nothing on advertising, bar some business cards, as the general consent locally was that it didn't work and that was also my experience based on the little I have tried. Be likeable and honest and offer good value for money (I do) and people will recommend you. CSP membership - great, HMRC - great, HPC registration I assume you have. Read, study, learn, do courses as much as you can. Fix your own physical problems too - that's a wonderful incentive and way to learn and I've found out about so many new areas of physio and methods that compliment physio by doing this. Hope that helps, do ask any more questions if you want and I'll see if I can help. It's interesting to hear of someone else doing the same - let me know how you get on!