Speaker 1 0:00

You're listening to Confidence To Thrive Podcast for ambitious healthcare practitioners and entrepreneurs. Welcome to Confidence Detroit, the product helping growing practitioners and healthcare entrepreneurs navigate the challenges and risks of regulation while building branding. Every episode, Christopher Cloke Browne tackles a different issue facing healthcare practitioners and entrepreneurs, or interviews someone building something that matters in their sector or profession. Let's jump into the episode. My name is Jody Rainsford, and today I'm going to be talking with Christopher Cloak Brown, Director of Owlicity. On this podcast episode, we are talking about why the fear of claims or complaints should never hold back your business and how to stop it. Welcome, Christopher.

Speaker 0:46

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 0:47

Let's get straight into the question at hand. So, why is this a problem for private healthcare practitioners? Why are claims and complaints potentially holding their businesses back?

Speaker 1:01

It really is. I think if you are in private healthcare for sure, and as you get more into the sort of aesthetics, wellness, well-being end of that kind of a private healthcare, then people have fairly high expectations of what they're going to deliver and what they're going to receive and what you're going to deliver. And so you are inevitably going to get some form of complaint and claim. Somebody's going to be unhappy with what you do for them. And that is very often about expectations and managing expectations, and we can talk about that later. But you just need to have the confidence to handle them correctly, get them dealt with well, and really stop a small problem developing into a big problem. I think the biggest issue is mountains out of molehills. Everything normally starts with somebody who's just a little bit dissatisfied, and it's all about nipping that in the bud, dealing with the issue, and keeping them away from trooping off and talking to a lawyer who will then say, Oh, that sounds bad. I can get you 20 grand for that. That's where your real trouble starts.

Speaker 1 2:17

So does this arise from the fact that practitioners aren't ready or prepared or just don't think it's going to happen to them and so they don't have anything in place?

Speaker 2:27

Yeah, I think it's one of those things where I don't think people are trained about it. Uh, and it is probably one of the most important pieces of your practice. It really is defending your practice, defending your reputation. Because as you can imagine, if you get dragged into social media or into courts and all sorts of stuff, then it's a big impact on your reputation, protecting your own mental health. One of the issues we have is our poor practitioners who do get complaints end up in WhatsApp messages with very angry, very insulting people, to be honest, and WhatsApp conversations at 11 o'clock at night, which is not good for anybody.

Speaker 1 3:09

And so where does this start? Where does this arise from the fact that people aren't necessarily prepared for this?

Speaker 3:16

It really is. I mean, if you think about the whole healthcare training, it's all about the treatments. There's a certain amount of business training, but maybe not even maybe not enough of that, and that's an issue we we think about and and talk about. Um, but it it's really not being trained and prepared, I think, is is really what it comes down to. I mean, most medical practitioners don't set out to harm people, injure people, do a bad job. They exactly the opposite. So it's maybe one of the things that's not on your mind. When you open your practice doors, advertise your wares and the patients come in, you're thinking about doing the best job you can, not what happens if it goes wrong.

Speaker 1 3:56

And one of the issues is that when people are unprepared for it, it's normally because they think it won't happen to them or they think that there is that there's no way they're gonna have any kind of liability because they're not wrong. But is there in your experience, is there a situation where it isn't always about professional competence or anything, it's simply about the perception of how someone, how a client feels, how a customer feels, and and and sometimes that can be the kind of thing that really disrupts what people generally think about how to deal with complaints and claims like this.

Speaker 4:35

Yeah, certainly within the sort of aesthetics and wellness functional medicine end of healthcare that we see, dentist history as well probably, by far the majority of complaints are not about the practitioner doing anything wrong. They are not about negligence, or at least not initially about negligence. It is very much some kind of dissatisfaction with the treatment or what's happened or the results, bad expectations, not people not managing expectations. It's often to be blunt, it can be financial, in that somebody's spent a little bit more money than they maybe anticipated and would like some of it back. There's a whole variety of reasons as it is as it starts out, and and the majority that we see are not about the practitioner doing anything wrong. So that might be another reason why practitioners don't think about it, because uh it's you know, I've done absolutely nothing wrong, and there's this person yelling at me about how they've ruined their life and they need their money back, and they need this and they need that. It's a very strange, very stressful scenario sometimes, and so it is an important part of managing the business, and sometimes actually, you know, it's it's the confidence, and we talk about the confidence to thrive, it is the confidence to stick to your guns and say, Well, no, actually, I have done nothing wrong. Uh, there is no problem. Uh so you know, let's let's work it out, or ultimately, even we support our practitioners and just holding lines say, Well, I've done absolutely nothing wrong, so sue me if you want to, but I don't think you'll win.

Speaker 1 6:09

Before we go on to that, what is the wider implication of not dealing with these properly in terms of uh the impact on the business? You've talked though about the immediate impact on, say, the mental health and everything else, but you know, this is a podcast about businesses growing, ambition, about doing things that are impactful in the sector. What is the wider issue with not having the right elements in place to be able to deal with this effectively?

Speaker 6:34

Yeah, it's it's a drag on the business. Um, and it's a drag on the business in in many, many ways. So one's just a straight time and effort in in terms of dealing with the complaints and claims, and it is very stressful, even for very experienced practitioners. I mean, we've we've got clients who've been in the business 17 years and had their first complaint, and you know, they found that really quite stressful, even with all that experience. So there's that aspect to it. There is a financial aspect to it. If you solve all your problems by giving people refunds, you don't have to give so many refunds before you you're not in business anymore because you've given all your profit away in refunds. So it's about protecting your financial position, and then ultimately you can get claims and get sued. And that has, I mean, that might well be covered by insurance, but ultimately your premiums go up, so you have additional costs on the business. If you've had a big issue in a very public spat with a patient, that can damage your professional reputation. We have a hair transplant surgeon, he did hair transplant on a not particularly high profile but professional opera singer. And anyway, that all sort of blew up, and there are all sorts of complaints and claims of negligence which resulted in articles in the newspaper with the headline Bad Hair Day.

Speaker 1 7:54

No, nobody wants that. And so what's very clear is that this is something that can happen whether you are relatively new or whether you have not experienced this for a while. And part of that is because it's a growing market, it's it's part of the reason, and also the potentially the number of claims and the size of claims is rising as well. What can be done then to really look at how to mitigate against this? So these aren't holding you back?

Speaker 8:28

So the first thing is your absolute defense is your note-taking, your documentation, your record keeping. So you want really good quality consent, and it needs to be what's called informed consent. So informed consent really is weighing the benefits of the treatment versus the risks of the treatment, and that has to be specifically to the patient themselves. So if they have a condition like diabetes or autoimmune disease, that can change the risk profile of the treatments. So it's not just the generic well person, it is that particular patient you have to worry about. They're undergoing cancer treatment, there's a huge variety, they're pregnant, there's a huge variety of things. So detailed informed consent where you establish clearly that between you and the patient, you agree that the benefits of the treatment outweigh the risks, and then very good, fairly detailed note-taking of the procedure, how it went, what happened, what you went through, because as you can imagine, you know, obviously you've got a thriving practice, you'll have thousands of patients. So the patient with the problem will be one of two or three thousand, but for them, they're probably the only practitioner that they visit. So they will remember exactly what happened, they will remember the precise nature of the treatment, the colour of the wallpaper, the clothes you wore, absolutely every detail. So if you're defending yourself, you need those good notes to refer to to establish exactly what happened and exactly what process you went through.

Speaker 1 10:06

And to what extent does it mean that when say claims are brought against the people, how likely are they going to have to settle in most cases? And is that an inevitability just simply because of the nature of the growth of the market at the moment?

Speaker 10:25

So settling is not an inevitability, and that is a lot of what we do is we help to go through with a practitioner, and then you know their initial reaction might be, Well, I don't think I did anything wrong. But again, when you're got a very upset and angry patient sending you WhatsApps at 11 o'clock at night saying, you know, you've ruined my life and I was fine until they came to see you, and so on. For any normal caring person, doubts can start to creep in. So we very quickly respond. We can be a sounding board to go through you, your process, we'll look at all your notes. So please, please take them, they are very important, and go through the whole thing and give you some kind of view and opinion on you know what we think your level of risk is, whether you we think that you've got a problem or not, and how robust your response can be. If you have no reason to if you haven't been negligent, you can just hold your ground and say, Well, sorry, I haven't. Now that risks all sorts of backlashes and social media blackmail and all sorts of things happen. These days, people try and leverage like mad, and we've been working with some clients on dealing with that social media blackwell blackmail and how you deal with the well just go and plaster all over social media what a terrible practitioner you are. So there's there's many levels to this, but the you know, if you haven't been negligent, maybe you shouldn't pay, and maybe you don't want a reputation for being somebody who somebody can go to just sticking in a complaint and get 20% off.

Speaker 1 11:57

Right, okay. This is probably something that is it feels like it's quite common in a growing market where there may be dealing with situations other practitioners haven't come up against before, like the rise of social media, the rise of this very, very kind of public place inside of it. To what extent is support and the experience that you bring to it essential then in order to help them navigate through that process and then have the confidence to be able to stand up to a claim?

Speaker 12:28

Yeah, we really think that that's the core of our offering, is and it's back to that confidence and confidence to thrive. As we've covered, you inevitably will get some form of disinsatisfaction and complaints. It's it's the nature of the business. So it is all about dealing with that and dealing with that effectively, and and by effectively we mean if you haven't been negligent standing your ground, and even as we say, with practitioners who've been around 17 years, when you're under the scrutiny, when you're under attack, you know, it's easy for those doubts to creep in. So it's it's about having people who are objective, knowledgeable, experienced. My colleague Roger, who was he was the first operations director of the NHS Litigation Authority, so the bit of the NHS that deals with all their claims. So what little hair he has left is grey, but he is enormously experienced. He's you know, I mean, again, just by way of example, and again, it's not just insurance stuff that we'll help you with. We help with the whole spectrum. We a client who has a number of dental practices, and some of these, I mean, uh this is uh a man who's clearly a complete bully, and his daughter lives with him, because he'll have it that way, but strictly speaking, his former wife daughter's mother has joint custody and was perfectly entitled to take her eight-year-old daughter to the dentist. This man took Umbridge as this and piled into the dentist about how they've breached his human rights, his confidentiality, a whole variety of things. So, some poor receptionist at a dental practice got this letter about you know these sort of six terrible things that the practice had done, centered into us, and Roger looks at it, rolls his eyes, mutters fathers for justice, and sorts it out.

Speaker 1 14:07

So that so that I mean that's really what it's about. That there's just so many different situations that even if you think you know, I know how to deal with claims, I know how to deal with these complaints of comments, there's so many different variations of things that have happened that it it really could be anything that that potentially blindsides uh a business or holds them up. Because I imagine that if you didn't have Roger there, you just literally would roll those eyes and say, you don't have to deal with that. That could have embroiled them for weeks and weeks of back and forth correspondence, potential legal costs while they were again looked at. So there's a commercial aspect to knowing how to deal with these things very, very quickly.

Speaker 14:47

Yes, no, that's that's exactly it, Jody. Yeah, it is being able to deal with these things, not just deal with them, but deal with them quickly and effectively without engaging dozens of lawyers and weeks of correspondence, because that is it's ultimately that that kills the business. It's the the costs of that are are just vast. You know, in that particular uh example I gave you, the guy's only objective was to cause trouble. So it it was it's actually quite a skill to effectively box him in to give him nowhere to go, basically, and and get him to go away. So if you haven't got that experience, it uh it's hard to see how the whole thing resolves itself.

Speaker 1 15:28

And so if you if you're if a practitioner's listen to this now, or someone has a private healthcare business and they are thinking to themselves, we're growing, we're we're ambitious, we're trying to do things. How do we what do we need to look at? What do we need to just do now to make sure that we are going in the right direction, we are protected in the way that we need to be?

Speaker 15:48

So certainly for the complaints and claims, it's all about the systems, procedures, and so on. Um I think it is a lot of it is, you know, just dealing with people, make sure that you know your your staff deal with people fairly and decently, and so on. I think it's also probably your frontline staff, and your frontline staff quite often are quite young and inexperienced, the people who write on the desk who might get this thing slammed on the desk. Some angry man storms in, that they know the channels to escalate and get immediate support. I think you have to have your team feel supported and know that you've got those channels up to people who have just got that maybe that bit of grey hair or less hair but grey or whatever it is, but somewhere to go to someone who can take it, you know, take it up and uh and absorb that, as you say, this is it's not just the medical complaints and claims that in particular in healthcare, you see every aspect of life. Um, and so what happens is is is really quite um really quite broad and varied.

Speaker 1 16:55

So just to round this episode off, and I think that's a good place to conclude. If someone wants to have a conversation with you, wants to find themselves in this situation, what can they do? What next step could they take in order to get the support they potentially need?

Speaker 17:11

You know, again, we're a business and we we we don't do things free forever, Jody. But uh we're actually we're always happy to help people who have an odd situation. So, you know, if if something weird happens, please just give us a call. We'll we're we're actually happy to help anybody, and that's just out of our own sort of sense of the morals and justice of the world. We don't like people, you know, causing perfectly decent, innocent people grief, basically. So we're always happy to help. And in fact, I was at a big aesthetics conference the end of last week, and again, I have an extraordinary experienced practitioner who is now a client of ours, and we were both speaking on the same panel, and she very kindly recounted the story of how she became our client, which to be honest, has was slightly lost in the midst of time in my mind, but it was absolutely that. She, after years in practice and building two successful practices, had some odd issue that came about, and her and Shore were being absolutely useless and not helping her whatsoever. We have the cosmetic courses, the people running the panel, are a mutual connection. So they put her in touch with us and we sorted it out for her.

Speaker 1 18:24

And so the other situation is that when people do call, it will they will actually be speaking to either yourself or Roger about their situation as well.

Speaker 18:33

Absolutely. When I'm in the office, I answer the phone, is how I know what happens in the business, basically.

Speaker 1 18:38

Okay, that's brilliant. So we'll round that episode up now. Thank you very much, Christopher, and we will speak on another episode. That's great, Jodie. Thanks for your time. Thank you for listening to Confidence to Thrive. Before you go, please rate, review, and subscribe to Confidence to Thrive on your preferred podcast platform and help us spread our message to others who are making a difference in private healthcare. This podcast was brought to you by Owlicity, intuitive advisors to support your business and visited practitioners owned healthcare practices on litigating risk to business control. Find the link in the show notes for listeningalytic.