- Clinician Onboarding
- 4 mins
The field of mental health is continuing to increase in popularity and attract more clients, providing ever-more opportunities for therapists to improve, change focus, and continue to grow professionally. Group practice owners should make it a priority to help the therapists they employ realize their career goals. If you run a group practice, clinicians in your office who are motivated to learn more, do more, and expand their areas of competence, reflect well on you. So it is in your interest to foster and facilitate their professional growth.
At any stage in their career, mental health practitioners you’re employing might be looking for a way to build their skills. A provisionally licensed practitioner or graduate student will probably be interested in moving up into an official practitioner role. A brand new contract hire might be looking to move from picking up a client here and there to working for you full-time. Someone who has seen clients for years might be looking to move into a more complicated, more in-demand, and, on average, more demanding space like couple’s therapy or substance abuse and behavioral disorder counseling or launch their own telehealth practice on the side. Another long-time counselor might be interested in getting a PhD and taking on more research-oriented pursuits. In all of these scenarios, you, their employer, can help.
Small mental health practices might not be in the position to offer professional development incentives like you find in, say, tech fields, where companies will cover the costs of professional certifications or continuing education classes. But there are other things you can do to support your staff in their professional development. In fact, there’s a solution you may have heard of, and may already have in place, that can offer, with no additional investment, a way to support your clinicians’ career-building ambitions. That solution is clinician onboarding.
One less obvious benefit, of the numerous benefits that group practices are experiencing with clinician onboarding, is that effective clinician onboarding can act as a foundation to foster the professional growth of clinicians. The following tips will show you how.
Constructing Clinicians a Strong Professional Foundation
Clinician onboarding solutions consist of short-form video content, created by mental health experts, which guides clinicians through the best practices for everything from billing to workplace etiquette to intake to client care. These types of resources give both new clinicians and veterans in the field a source of information on the professional basics that they can always return to.
Just as having the basics of swimming technique down pat is the basis for a talented swimmer rising to the collegiate level, and the Olympic level, professional basics establishing the infrastructure for building a career. Once clinicians have the standards down for seeing clients and conducting business efficiently, they can follow their own interests and instincts in terms of specialization or other forms of career advancement, and even bring the administrative knowledge to any new endeavor they hope to spin up. Wherever a clinician wants to take their career, onboarding provides a baseline for building it.
Successful Workplaces Yield Growth And Inspiration
Working in a successful, well-run practice sets up clinicians to grow professionally, and can inspire them to push themselves further in all their professional endeavors. A therapist’s office that provides standout care for clients will receive more word-of-mouth recognition, which in turn will bring in more clients. More clients means more money, making it possible to spend more resources to help clients and improve the office (or telehealth) experience. In such positive environments, clinicians enjoy working with, and learn more from, their colleagues. So there’s an element of professional development built into working in a well-functioning office—clinicians get better at what they do together.
They also don’t experience the stressors that come with a dysfunctional office; having to refile paperwork, missing appointments and pointing fingers over scheduling errors, or any number of other things that can divert a clinician’s attention from their clinical focus and dampen their enthusiasm for the field. Satisfied therapists, working in an office where they can focus on, and succeed with, helping their clients, will naturally want to take on more, learn more, and advance their careers.
Effective clinician onboarding is becoming synonymous with this kind of well-run, effective practice. The clinicians who get a start working in an environment that uses onboarding (and who are always able to reach back to those materials for a refresher at any point in their tenure there) will have an advantage in how they work, and will be set up to develop their skills and progress in the field, just by working in an environment where everyone—from day one—is on the same page about fundamental best practices.
Onboarding: Make a Career Of It!
There is any number of reasons that mental health clinicians might want develop their careers, including: the satisfaction that comes with building new skills, the enjoyment of being able to face and master more varied professional challenges, the greater esteem in the eyes of the profession, and of course the financial gain that comes with a more robust CV.
Providing mental health services is a rewarding career filled with opportunity, but there’s no question it can be taxing. Helping clinicians build a foundation of competence they can be confident about, and creating a workplace that removes extra sources of stress, is critical to fostering long, helpful, fruitful careers.
That’s one more reason that if you’ve not yet implemented clinician onboarding you should consider it—to help empower clinicians to succeed, and let them get excited about achieving mastery of new subjects and competence in new areas. Establishing a culture of professional development is good for your practice, your clinicians, and your clients. Effective client onboarding is the first step in making that culture a reality!
