Why Your Ketamine Clinic Needs A Detailed Policies and Procedures Manual
You’ve heard it’s important. In fact, when you signed up for your malpractice insurance, you were probably asked if you had policies and procedures in place for the management of specific emergencies. Do you? And if you do, are your policies and procedures for your ketamine clinic detailed enough? Here are the three main reasons why you need to ensure that you have a detailed policies and procedures manual on board in order to successfully and prudently manage your ketamine clinic—to ensure the standardization of your operational and other procedures, to serve as an ongoing reference for all of your staff members, and, of course, to lower your liability and mitigate risk.
Why Standardizing Your Operational Procedures Is Important
Possibly the most obvious reason why every ketamine clinic should have a policies and procedures manual is to ensure continuity of care and standardization in the carrying out of all operational procedures. This is not limited to ketamine clinics, as operational procedures can include how patient data is managed, workplace conduct and professionalism, general clinic operations, and more. In addition to these standard policies, ketamine clinics need to have infusion- and ketamine-specific policies on board as well, and one benefit of doing so is the fact that it helps maintain a consistent patient experience.
If, for example, every time a patient comes in for an infusion, things are done in a different order or in a completely different way, it detracts from the patient experience. Under these circumstances, patients tend to attribute such experiences to inexperience on the part of one or more of the clinic’s employees or, even worse, a general lack of organization on the clinic’s part. This can lead to poor rapport, bad reviews, and other occurrences requiring expensive and difficult-to-achieve reputation management.
On the other hand, having a standardized manual from which you train all new employees ensures that the patient experience remains consistently superb and gives patients a sense of security, as they now know what to expect at each appointment, regardless of who is handling their care. With a detailed policies and procedures manual on board, patients are more likely to say things like, “Regardless of who I see at clinic X, my experience is always the same, always wonderful; they’ll take care of you there.”
Why Your Staff Members Need to Have Easy Access to Your Policies and Procedures
Not only does having a policy and procedures manual make it easier for ketamine clinics to maintain the standard of care when hiring new employees, but the manual also serves as an ongoing reference for all staff members. The fact of the matter is that people forget information. This is especially the case for information that isn’t used on a daily basis. If one of your staff members, for example, does not recall the correct procedure for the management of an anaphylactic reaction, he or she should at least know exactly where to find that information so that, in the event that it is needed (and preferably before), the staff member has the opportunity to review the exact steps that he or she should take in order to provide the patient with the care he or she needs and deserves.
How Explicitly Stating Your Policies and Procedures Mitigates Risk
The third and possibly most serious reason why every ketamine clinic must have a detailed policies and procedures manual is to limit liability and unwanted legal ramifications. Oftentimes as humans, we tend to think that the worst in life would never happen to us. Unfortunately, this underlying belief sometimes spills over into our business dealings and leads us to do things like assume that all employees know how to handle every emergency. Even if this were the case (which it definitely isn’t), people sometimes freeze in a time of crisis. This makes it difficult for them to remember the procedures they were taught for managing such a crisis at the most recent staff meeting or, even worse, at their new hire orientation.
If you, as a provider, or one of your employees encounter an emergency for which you are not prepared and the patient involved chooses to bring a suit against you, your actions in the time of crisis will be scrutinized as will your policies for handling such emergencies. In order to limit the likelihood of your and your employees’ licenses being jeopardized, your clinic being fined, criminal accusations being brought against you, and more, it’s crucial that you have standardized policies and procedures for your ketamine clinic and that you and all staff members periodically review the most relevant of these policies in order to ensure consistency, avoid fines, and maintain your reputation of providing superb patient care.
If you would like to make it easy on yourself and take your patient experience and clinic management to the next level, check out our done-for-you policies and procedures manual. It is over 400 pages and contains over 180 policies and procedures, is tailored to ketamine clinics, and is completely customizable, so you can enter your information and use it as is or you can edit the policies and procedures as needed to reflect your clinic’s current policies.
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