Client: Freelance
Subject: What is Legionnaires’ Disease?
Legionnaires’ disease is a severe form of pneumonia with symptoms appearing two to 10 days after inhaling water vapor infected by the Legionella bacteria. It is infamous for being spread in large scale outbreaks; infecting people at hotel conferences, office buildings and cruise ships who breathe moistened air contaminated by air conditioning systems and indoor fountains.
The disease’s invisibility—it is spread not by a violently coughing coworking but a gently bubbling water feature—coupled with a high mortality rate, make it a very intimidating foe. But preventing Legionella from infiltrating your commercial facility is possible if you implement an aggressive and highly detailed water safety plan.
The most important focus for the facility must be preventing the Legionella bacteria from growing. Legionella can thrive in a variety of settings: office buildings, hospitals, cruise ships, or schools. Any facility with a complex cooling or potable water system must be vigilant about how they treat their water systems to prevent a major Legionella bloom. Keeping the water at a safe temperature, below 68 and above 122°F, is a great place to start. Preventing the water from stagnating is also vital, as is limiting the presence of nutrients for bacteria to feed on. The entire system, with a focus on pipes, tanks, and reservoirs, must be thoroughly disinfected periodically using either heat or chemicals. The duct system of the building should be designed or renovated to prevent excessive vapor production.
When a person is infected by Legionnaires’ disease, it is important that they start antibiotic treatment immediately. They will notice symptoms including a high fever, cough, headache, muscle pain, and occasionally gastrointestinal, neurological and heart problems. The patient will receive antibiotics for an average of three to 10 days, and has a high likelihood of full recovery with modern medicine.
Client: Simple Practice
Subject: The Four Essentials to Starting Your Private Practice
The best and worst thing about starting your own private practice is that it gives you complete freedom and control. You can do anything; but you also have to do everything. This is pretty intimidating, even burdensome; because in our experience, most therapists enter the industry to help people, not because they’re eager for the responsibility of operating a business.
The good news is that running and growing a practice doesn’t have to be hard or prohibitively expensive; and you can do it. You just need to prioritize how to spend your resources. For practitioners just starting out, this article unpacks the essential requirements to begin seeing patients:
Booking
First, you need a way to book clients. That means a dedicated place, be it a phone line, web portal, office or website, where clients can reach out and schedule appointments. Just as importantly, you need an accurate calendar to track client sessions and your own availability. It’s vital for the sake of professionalism and reliability that you keep good records. Few things will turn clients away faster than having to wait for their appointment to begin.
Client Intake
You’ll collect much of the same information from each of your clients, so having a simple, reliable and repeatable way of getting each client’s intake paperwork completed quickly and without mistakes is really important. It’s great to use technology to streamline the client intake process. Treat it like an assembly line by preparing your forms and having a set way to send and receive them back from your clients. You have flexibility in how you’ll handle the specifics; the forms you use, the method clients use to fill them out, how you send and receive them. It’s just important that you have a set way of doing client intake to avoid errors.
Notes
Proper documentation is vital to good care, so your notes have to be done correctly each time. Much like client intake forms, the note taking process needs to be consistent and reproducible. Make it simple to avoid errors. The best way is to type notes out on a computer or mobile device, because you will be able to retain a searchable digital record. You can take notes by hand, but we don’t recommend it as those notes will have to be scanned and stored after the fact, leaving you with extra steps and a non-searchable record.
Payment
The final essential is payment processing. If you can’t accept payments, you don’t exist as a business.. There are a lot of decisions you’ll need to make, what forms of payments you’ll take, whether the convenience of accepting credit cards is worth the fees you’ll be forced to eat, if you want to take insurance… it’s a lot, and you need to figure these details out for yourself eventually. In the beginning, though, make it very simple; choose what’s best for your practice, and then communicate very clearly to clients their payment options, when you expect payment, and the consequences for late payment.
diana cowgill 