It’s been almost 2 months since I last posted. It’s been a tiring couple of years as we expanded the clinic, creating new spaces to house the type of rheumatology care we want at BJC Health. Our premises look good and with around 400 square metres of space at both locations, we comfortably house a range of complementary services for people with rheumatic disease (peruse our services).
This has led to much higher costs. We’ve taken up more space than we need due to the logistical difficulty in expanding clinic space gradually, spent more money than we probably should have as we wanted a certain look and feel to provide the right workplace.
The next goal has been to create strong foundations and to engage our community.
A more solid IT infrastructure to facilitate the clinical experience, website rejigs and expanded social media activities to try and improve the out-of-clinic experience for our clients and to increase awareness of what we do (please like us on facebook).
We developed and published the Anti-Inflammatory Eating Cookbook as well as our rheumatoid arthritis book to help people and their loved ones understand the disease.
Our staff remain a wonderful challenge. We have good people, people who care and who want to make a difference. But we can all be better.
We want to cultivate talent. People who will put the patient at the centre of their work day, who put their team first. People who strive to do everything a little bit better each time so that we can all accomplish amazing amounts of important stuff. We want a team that learns fast, has grit and resilience, and provides a wonderful, memorable experience to the people who trust us with their health.
We want our rheumatologists, who’ve been moulded in a traditional, institutional environment to break free of silo-mentality and to continue to conceive and consider innovative ways to solve the many, many issues that affect healthcare delivery and access.
These are taxing goals. Consuming time, energy, dollars, brain space.
Does any of this matter to you?
I hope so. The viability of the type of rheumatology service we are trying to create in a community setting matters! No-one else in Australia is trying to do this.
If we can’t make this gig work, if we all just get too jaded and drained by the perpetual extra work it takes to provide high quality, patient-centred care, what’s left is status quo - Standard service provision, more disjointed and inconvenient, delivered with fewer smiles.
I’m biased of course. I’ve invested my whole career as a rheumatologist to make group, multidisciplinary rheumatology a practical reality. I want to leave the legacy of changing the way things are typically done.
So for my first blog post for 2018, I am documenting the challenges BJC Health faces in making multidisciplinary rheumatology care work in a viable manner.
These are the things occupying my thoughts when I’m not with my patients:
- Refocussing BJC Health’s raison d’être to: We change the lives of people with rheumatic disease to help them live and feel better
- Rallying our whole team behind this purpose, while cultivating the best workplace culture we can
- Helping our Physiotherapists, Exercise Physiologists, Remedial Massage Therapists and Dietitian highlight their specific interest and expertise in treating rheumatic disease
- Working out how to exceed the expectations of our customers again and again
- Coming up with more affordable treatment packages for people with chronic rheumatic disease so that they can more easily access the services we provide (while making this business-viable)
- Improving awareness of rheumatic disease in the community and among health professionals
- Helping our referring GPs with improved access and spreading awareness among our local GPs of the stuff we do at BJC Health
- Becoming the go-to centre for people with rheumatic disease living within a 10km radius of our clinics
It’s shaping up to be a busy 2018!
I’d love any thoughts you may have.
Note: the picture is from our recent Xmas party. Happy New Year to all of you! I wish you good health.
