Slow start to our new shiatsu clinic
On Saturday the Brighton College held its first student clinic in Southwick. We only had three clients so a slow start. I did not work in the clinic because of the numbers but as I had other commitments elsewhere it was nice to concentrate on them.
I did go to the MS Centre to have a meeting with the other students to rework our marketing strategy. Our first step is to rewrite our poster. I was the author of the first draft and it was too verbose. Together, we have cut out a lot of the unnecessary text and my task this week is to come up with version two. We also need to target our advertising better; maybe trying local yoga and martial arts groups.
We have to think of this student clinic as our own practise and make every effort to build it up. This is a golden opportunity to experiment with advertising and marketing a shiatsu clinic before we go out into the world hoping to pay our mortgages from shiatsu work.
Tony Brown @ November 20, 2007
I think it’s great that you look at your student clinic in this way. I find at my school that many interns don’t have that kind of perspective about our clinics. I think part of it is being very busy (most interns are simultaneously writing their thesis, preparing for boards and their own practice, taking classes and interning) but part of it is not realizing how critical it is to treat the school clinics like our own.
I think on top of working on marketing, it’s just really important to do follow up with patients and treat them as if they were your clients in your practice.
Good luck building up your clinic!
Eric
Try promotion in stores selling organic food and stuff like that.
Thank you for the suggestions. We have a college weekend coming up so I will put these suggestions to the rest of the group.
Its amazing that the students are responsible for marketing the school clinic. While we did tell our friends about it, in the end, it was the school’s responsiblity to bring in clients. Personally I don’t think its the students job. If your and your classmates need to get so many clinic hours in, then your school needs to be helping to bring in bodies.
When the College was located in Brighton the clinic was marketed by the natural health centre in whose building we practised. In fact they did most of the administration for the College I believe. But now we are in Southwick the College tutors are in charge of the admin and the students are building the clinic.
We have no set number of clinic hours; we have to have at least two treatments assessed by qualified (MRSS) practitioner. So just getting a few clients in each month will suffice if we were just content with getting the minimum experience to qualify.
But I think this is great real world experience. In a few months we won’t have a College to supply us clients, we will have to invent ways to attract them ourselves. The student clinic is a good way to see what works before that time.
I see. We had to preform a specific number of sessions to graduate. It will be good practice for business skills.