There are some magic numbers when it comes to getting bang for your rental buck, and Tracey Johnson has crunched them for you.
It can be hard graft running a business, but there are ways to ramp up financial and professional rewards.
Tracey Johnson is CEO at Inala Primary Care. She’s spent years as a health economist, as a policy advisor and helping health-tech start-ups scale up. Today on The Tea Room Tracey spills the tea on the simple economics of right-sizing GP clinics.
“There’s a sweet point if you’ve got four to five GPS, there’s a business model that can be formed around that,” she says. “The next tipping point seems to sit at around nine to 12 doctors, and then again up around 20 doctors.”
Subleasing to pathology and other allied health is critical to viability, as is hot-desking consult rooms across longer opening hours.
Ms Johnson says that if you’re running a practice with nine doctors, and you’ve got the capacity to move up to 12 doctors, the way you might do that is by opening from 7am to 7pm with doctors working shifts depending on their lifestyle needs.
“By reducing the cognitive burden that happens from working too many hours on those really long days, practices are actually finding doctors enjoy their work more, you get more utilisation around those rooms and generally things come together better for the patients as well,” she says.
Ms Johnson is also smashing down the traditional barriers between the local health district and public health network in her region. She has a strong motivation to do so, working in Queensland’s largest housing commission suburb.
“We have the highest rate of disability pensioners in the state in this suburb,” she says. “We have five jails just down the road. I’ve spent the last decade looking at what I can bring out of hospitals and give into patient hands and into the hands of primary care providers to actually make life better for everyone.”
You can listen and subscribe to the show by searching for “The Tea Room Medical Republic” in your favourite podcast player.
