Understanding Healthcare Private Practice Management from an Educational Psychologist

It never fails to amaze me how each healthcare practitioner in private practice manages their private practice. In a recent episode of our Moulding Private Practice Show, we spoke to Dayne Williams, an Educational Psychologist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Private practice management is usually a difficult topic for most healthcare practitioners, but Dayne explains his prudent approach to getting to grips with this complex topic. 

Dayne mentioned that being a teacher was always a passion and dream of his. He found a love for psychology during his undergraduate years at university. And then at some point, he decided to merge the two. When he realized that educational psychology was actually possible, that was even more exciting for him since he could combine his love of teaching with psychology. That was when he found his career and life direction and never looked back.

He did confess that getting the qualification of an Educational Psychologist was quite difficult, and he was glad that he didn’t have children or any major life commitments as he was in the process of getting this qualification. He needed to do his studies part-time which took longer and involved much more time on his side. This also meant that he delayed his need to look at private practice management until much later in his working career.

After completing his degree, he needed to do an internship at a school in South Africa. He loved the experience and it was a wonderful time. But after that internship, he moved into private practice. He could not work at a school, since most schools in South Africa do not have the financial means to afford an educational psychologist. Moreover, schools do have counsellors who do a wonderful job with the first-level intervention from students. In terms of educational psychologists, the schools tend to refer to you in a private capacity, which means that you need to have your relevant private practice management in place. Based on his experience and stories from colleagues, it seems to be the common approach for Educational Psychologists to go into private practice, which means that there is an ever-growing need for private practice management skills for healthcare practitioners like himself. 

The need to consider private practice management and private practice for Educational Psychologists is further strengthened by the fact that each school can hire only one educational psychologist. It is true that there are not many psychologists in South Africa, so ideally there should be enough work for educational psychologists to be employed at schools. But this is not the case; hence, education psychologists must understand private practice management to evolve in their careers.

Although at the time of writing, Dayne was only two years in private practice as an Educational Psychologist, he admitted that it was a wonderful experience. It is a challenge, and he agrees that running a private practice ultimately means managing a business. Although his training in psychology and psychological services was in place and certainly was valuable, his tertiary education at the universities did not teach educational psychologists about digital marketing and administration, networking, taxes, healthcare insurance, and all of the things that go into running a successful private practice. But he enjoyed the process and found a natural curiosity in learning new things and uncovering the hidden secrets of private practice management. 

It was an enlightening experience discussing private practice management with an Educational Psychologist such as Dayne Williams, and understanding how his career evolved to the current level.

If you would like to hear more about medical private practice management and uncover other stories such as that of Dayne Williams, you can go to https://kitrin.com/medical-practice-management. Many of our clients also prefer to concentrate solely on the medical billing solutions rather than the more comprehensive practice management aspects. In this case, we created a useful resource to guide them through this process - which can be found here https://kitrin.com/medical-billing-solutions.

If you’re a healthcare practitioner or you know of a colleague or loved one that would like to share their knowledge and experiences of being a healthcare practitioner and a special area of interest of theirs, we would love to give them the opportunity to be on our Moulding Health and Moulding Private Practice podcasts. This will not only help the healthcare practitioner with additional referrals to their private practice, but it also helps us as a society learn more from amazing healthcare practitioners.