A week in the life of the HealthyPractice team.

Welcome to our newsletter for May.  This month we thought we’d give you an insight into a week in the life of the HealthyPractice team. 

Since April we’ve changed our working days and hours:

• Shaun works Monday to Thursday
• Chris works Wednesday to Friday
• Bryce works Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; and
• Fiona works a 9-day fortnight with alternate Fridays off

And we are currently recruiting for an additional full time team member.

In March the HealthyPractice team had over 1,100 contacts with MAS members.

The majority of our contacts are via email which is great as it allows us to allocate them to the most suitable team member and it also gives us a chance to complete a little research prior to responding – we can always phone you if a discussion would be helpful.  We aim to respond same day to emails received prior to midday, and the following morning for those received after midday.

Given we have different team members on each day, it’s best to use the business@mas.co.nz email address, rather than our individual emails, to make sure your queries are responded to in a timely way.

So what does an average week look like for us?

• We review about 30 Individual Employment Agreements, contracts for service and letters of offer. Things we commonly adjust:
  • Agreement type e.g. fixed term, or casual that should be permanent part time
  • Hours of work
  • Trial period dates – remember the notice period can be shorter for this
  • Letter of offer details don’t match the IEA
• We typically have three or four disciplinary processes on the go with practices at any one time. As anyone who has been through this will know it is stressful and time consuming. We have some great guidance notes on healthypractice.co.nz - please give us a call if you wish to discuss this process further.  Our common messages are:
  • No predetermined view going into the process
  • Process and actions must be seen to be fair and reasonable
  • You can’t revisit issues from ages ago that were (or even weren’t) dealt with back then
  • Be timely and document your process well
  • Letter inviting to disciplinary meeting must detail all concerns with the evidence to support them, advise of potential outcomes, and allow time for employee to seek advice and have support or representation at the meeting
  • If issuing a warning or worse, then give it as a potential outcome to allow time for final responses to be considered before providing a final outcome
  • If you hold employment disputes insurance notify your insurer before doing anything.
• On average we discuss and support 17 subscriber practices with staff performance each week.
  • Dealing with issues early – might stop it from becoming habitual
  • Document and follow a fair process
  • Call us to discuss as you need.
• Shaun and Bryce deal with about 15 practice ownership queries, this can be from those looking to buy a practice, sell a practice, or wanting to look at succession planning or the ownership structure and practice agreement for their current practice. Definitely worth a chat with these two if any of these are on your radar!
• We also answer queries about leave and pay, recruitment, restructures, resignation and termination, Privacy and Health information privacy
• Covid-19 queries are gradually decreasing, those have definitely kept us busy and on our toes for the last 2 years.
• Chris does an amazing job supporting subscribers with HealthyPractice tutorials – particularly useful for new owners, managers, and team leaders.  Done by phone/Zoom/MS teams these take around 20-30 minutes, covering the most used parts of the website, with even long-time users finding something new. Email business@mas.co.nzto book one in.
• Fiona provides back up to the rest of the team.  She champions our research and content management, regularly updating the HealthyPractice content along with writing HealthyPractice newsletters each month and articles for various sector publications. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we could add content about any employment or business areas.

Remember your subscription gives you unlimited business hours access to us, so don’t be shy - we’d love to hear from you too. So email us on business@mas.co.nz  or give us a call on 0800 800 627.