5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
This article highlights five critical mistakes healthcare professionals should avoid to ensure their practices thrive. Addressing these areas can lead to more effective and successful healthcare practices.
Healthcare professionals are relentlessly hardworking and productive. You are skilled at task-switching, you have mastered skilled cognitive work despite constant distractions, and you have proven your agility through unpredictable seasons. While you have learned to manage the pivots and shifts throughout each day, we have work to do to prepare you for the pivots and shifts of the decade.
After ten years supporting and coaching practice owners in community healthcare practices, I have put together five of the most common mistakes to avoid in your practice:
Mistake #1: Assumptions instead of facts
We tell ourselves stories all day long across all parts of our lives. Making strategic decisions in business based solely on assumptions is poor practice. For example, Jacinda is passionate about menopause and wants to launch a non-publicly funded menopause service. She assumes no one would pay $200 out of pocket for an hour-long consultation and therefore never launches the program. Ask “Is this an assumption or is it a fact?”. Test the water. Ask your patients. Ask your friends. Find out if your assumptions are facts before you make decisions.
Mistake #2: Perspective is lacking
You only see the world from where you stand. You need perspective of all those impacted (staff, patients, allied care providers, community) to design the best services, layouts, processes, and programs. Top-down decisions may be faster, but that does not mean they are better. Discussion and healthy debate will make your solutions more successful.
Mistake #3: Incorrect attributions
Attribution error is when someone attributes their success to their skills but their failures to bad luck. Classic human behaviour perhaps, but you can be coached to see it may not have been bad luck, but rather a lack of skill or process. A successful practice is not a pass or fail exercise. It’s a learning journey where you must recognize what made something successful and then do more of that. And similarly, what factors made something fail and how to fix it and move forward.
Mistake #4: Risk management as an afterthought
Healthcare is chronically reactive. Your tasks are typically reactive to whatever walks in the door. Continuous improvement is typically reactive to incidents. When the systems and processes fail, then healthcare teams replan. While agility is important, many reactive actions could have been risk managed before they became issues. When you develop your next service, process, or protocol, ask, “What could go wrong here” and then, if your answer is probable or highly impactful, plan a risk response BEFORE you need it.
Mistake #5: Continuing education is all clinical
It’s hard to imagine becoming a healthcare professional without having learned core content in your field. Yet many practice owners and managers expect to be great business owners and leaders without training in business or leadership. You don’t need an MBA to run a successful practice but you should consider diversifying your professional development to include content on management and leadership so you can make your pharmacy and business aspirations come to life.
If any of these five common mistakes resonate with you, it’s time to course correct and implement best practices to ensure they don’t hold your potential back any longer.
Adapted for general health practices from publications written for Pharmacy Practice + Business magazine:
https://www.canadianhealthcarenetwork.ca/five-common-mistakes-hold-us-back