The Many Problems That Go With Owning A Private Practice

Running a private medical practice of any description involves a lot of hard work. You've trained and qualified as a doctor over several years, and you may well have spent more years training in a speciality, so when you enter private practice - perhaps after many years working in the NHS - you deserve to earn the rewards.

However, the realisation may have dawned on you before you went into private practice, or you may not have understood all of the complications that can be involved. In effect you now own, or are a partner in, a business, and that is great in several respects. It means that you can work the hours that suit you, you can charge your patients whatever rates you feel that you deserve, and you will certainly earn more than you would in the NHS because there are no restrictions.

However, along with that come a number of problems that never concerned you in the NHS because it simply wasn't part of the system. Chief of these, of course, is that when you operate a business you have to ensure that you get paid. Many a business has gone under - not just in the healthcare sector, but in many others - for the simple reason that the business owners or directors made mistakes. That can also happen even if the owners didn't make mistakes but were the unfortunate victims of circumstance.

One classic mistake is to rely too much on one customer. There is an old rule that states that you should never, under any circumstances, have more than 15% of your turnover with one customer. The reasoning is that if that customer went broke, or just decided to take his business elsewhere, you could probably survive. Any more than 15%, and if you lose the business, you will probably not survive.

Then there are circumstances outside the control of a business. Let's think about HS2 for a moment. Billions of pounds of government money are to be invested, but let's say that the government - which is now a new one - decided to pull the plug on HS2. Hundreds, if not thousands, of small companies would go to the wall as a result because they put their faith in HS2 and never even considered that something like that could happen.nusa penida tour