If clinics don’t take stock of what’s happening in the environment and make smart decisions, they will fail. This is what happened to many GP clinics during the pandemic around the globe. This is according to Dr Todd Cameron, GP and M3 Health Clinics Founder. He has been in general practice for over 20 years mostly in Western Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
The Pandemic saw the closure of many clinics because clinics weren’t prepared for the effects of the pandemic and made poor decisions to manage the situation. According to Dr Todd Cameron, the reasons GP clinics failed are because of 1) a lack of trust among colleagues that people have their back at the workplace, 2) delayed decision-making in clunky management structures, and 3) poor decision-making.
A low trust environment within a clinic will fail in a pandemic because employees have no confidence that the management has their back, and many will leave at the first opportunity.
Large clinics will also fail in a pandemic because decision-making is often slow in a large management structure. They would also lose a large number of patients for this reason.
Clinics that make some decisions will probably survive the pandemic, but they would have lost a small number of their audience. The reason is because such clinics are not very responsive to what’s occurring in the environment.
Clinics that make smart decisions understand the importance of building high trust environments and aligning everybody to a single purpose. They understand the need to delay gratification (that is, making a large profit) in the current situation but continue to pivot and modify their service delivery model to be as efficient and effective as possible taking into consideration what is happening around them.
Those patients who have left certain GP practices for their lack of responsiveness will invariably move to the clinics making smart decisions.
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