“He just wanted me to come back for his bank balance…”

Your patients just coming back for maintenance care because they think it helps them or because they think it's about your bank balance. This is something that I know a lot of us worry about when it comes to talking about maintenance care. And I'm going to share with you a really simple tip that nobody's using to actually prevent that and help patients get more out of maintenance care. As an added bonus, you feel more comfortable as well. If you know me and my stuff, you know, that's what I'm all about, is getting patients better results whilst doing it in a way that feels more comfortable to you. So this actually comes off the back of a patient that I saw a long time ago, who I still see now for maintenance visits. And he'd been seeing a previous chiropractor and he'd been going for maintenance, and then he stopped and then it came back and he came in to see me and I asked him, asking about the plan and this sort of thing, and he said, yeah, you know, he said I had to come back every six weeks, otherwise it was probably going to get worse again. I did, but it kind of felt like I was just coming back for his bank balance, really, like, it just felt like he just wanted me to keep coming back forever. So I stopped. And then a year later, this pain's come back. This patient has now been seeing me for maintenance care for over 11 years now. We've spaced out and it's varied around the time, but he's been coming consistently for that time. He knows I'm not recommending it for my bank balance, that it's actually in his interests. And there's a really simple thing you can do to help this with patients. Because where nearly all of us go wrong is we talk about maintenance care at the start of care, and then if we're good, we revisit that a little bit later on when we say, okay, this is the end of acute care, this is now maintenance care. And we have that discussion with the patient once, and we say maintenance care is you coming back every four weeks, six weeks, three months, whatever it is you recommend on an ongoing basis for the rest of your life. Maybe you don't use that phrase, but that's what you're asking the patient to commit to. So do you want to not see me anymore or do you want to see me for the rest of your life? That's a huge, huge ask. One of those two things. It's massive extremes either way. And they don't even know what maintenance care is like yet. They don't even know what they'll experience. They don't know what it will be like. So the thing to do that's really easy, that very few of us do, is just do a trial period of maintenance care. Just, that's it. You know, I will normally say to patients, okay, so what I'd recommend is for the next three months, let's see you once a month, or for the next six months, let's see you every six weeks, whatever it is, give them a trial period of three to six visits of maintenance care and just say, this is what I'd recommend. Let's try that for three months or six months, whatever it may be, and then we'll reassess and see how you're doing. And that's a much easier commitment for patients because they've probably already seen you a bunch more times than that. So you're only really asking for a few extra visits over quite a big time span and then you're going to revisit it. So you need to specifically enrol them in maintenance care. Tell them, okay, now we're starting maintenance care if that's something they want to do and do it for a trial period. The reassessment doesn't have to be a really thorough, in depth review if they don't need that. But there's an end date. You're telling them, at this point, we'll stop the maintenance care, we'll discuss how we feel you're doing and we can make further plans from there. And then maybe next time you go, okay, great, it's doing really well. The patient's really happy. Why don't we try a bit longer now? Let's review it over the next 12 months, whatever it may be. Now, standard, gold standard is we should be reviewing at least every 12 months, every maintenance patient. It's okay if you're not. I miss that too. We're really bad at doing that generally. But at least letting them know you're going to revisit the conversation every now and then when you do that, it's a much smaller ask for patients. It feels more comfortable because, you know, I'm only asking them for a few visits here, and it's much more likely they'll take you up on that. They'll get to experience the benefit and that they'll stick with it longer term. So that's the tip for today. If you have any concerns about maintenance or you'd like to improve the number of patients who are taking up maintenance care, just offer them a trial period. A few visits. That's really all it needs to be. Specifically, state the date when you're starting that, have that conversation. Enroll them and enrol them for three to six months. Then revisit. That's all it takes. Give that a try. As always, any questions, anything like that, let me know. Otherwise, I'll be back soon for another video. Take care of.