Operations, staffing, and workflow guidance for running a healthcare practice.
Many Nigerian practices set their fees when they opened and have adjusted them only reluctantly since, while costs moved considerably. Reviewing prices is uncomfortable and avoiding it is expensive.
A second location is the most common growth move in Nigerian private healthcare and the one most likely to weaken a practice that was working. The decision turns on a few unglamorous questions.
Waiting is the most common complaint in Nigerian healthcare and the most commonly misdiagnosed. The cause is rarely that clinicians are slow, and adding staff often fails to fix it.
New staff in small practices are usually inducted by being sat next to someone busy. It works eventually, teaches them that colleague's habits including the bad ones, and takes far longer than it needs to.
Most Nigerian practices are run administratively by the founding clinician, in the evenings, badly, because there was never a moment when hiring someone felt affordable. There are clearer signals than affordability.
A patient asking for a copy of their records, or a relative asking on their behalf, puts a practice on the spot. Deciding the rules in advance is much easier than deciding them at the counter.
Every Nigerian practice has lost power during a clinic. Very few have written down what happens next, which means the response depends on who is on duty and how calm they are.
Most clinic schedules assume every consultation takes the same time and nothing goes wrong. The first complicated patient of the morning then pushes the delay through every appointment after it.
A clinic phone that rings constantly is usually answering the same small set of questions all day. Writing the answers down, once, frees the desk for the calls that genuinely need a person.
Missed appointments are usually treated as a patient discipline problem. Most of them are caused by things the practice controls, and the cheapest fixes are not technological.