Today I want to talk about opportunity. 

Yes, opportunity (you read right). For many Healthcare Professionals it's the opportunity that's left on the table related to your hard-earned skills and expertise.

This may be a hard-learned lesson for a lot of Healthcare Professionals (HCPs). Struggling with reimbursements, market-saturations, distinguishing yourself from your competition, and finally dealing with fluctuating service demands (aka vacation time). Left for too long the result of long hours and endless paperwork attracting and then treating clients can start to feel overwhelming, frustrations and lead to burn-out. Adding services that your clients already need, want, and desire is a an opportunity that many HCP want to leverage in their businesses  to achieve the success whether it's more time off, less stress, or more revenue - that they've dreamed of. 

If you are already a HCP, what you have already invested in yourself (via schooling, etc) to get you to this very point in your career gives you a significant advantage when it comes to serving your market. 

...do I have your attention now? 

Awesome. And I hope so. Because I full heartedly believe that with your background you can literally change the lives of your clients. Why? Well, with the skills and strategy that I'm going to share with you in this blogpost, I want you to start thinking of the value proposition (and potential!) of what combining both the prevention (via ergonomics strategies) with your normal offerings can do for your clients (and your business).  

In this post I'm going to share some high-level thinking that may have stood in between you serving your customers in the past, specifically with office ergonomics, consultations, and training. On that note, let's start this post! 

The Biggest Fallacies with Professional Ergonomics  

Ok, so I want to give my disclaimer starting out this post. I am very passionate about HCPs adding ergonomics to their professional skillset. Any HCP can do this also long as they are both competent (can be hard won by) and confident in their skills.

I'm going to get into exactly how this can look for you. You may be asking how do I have all this first-hand knowledge? Well, I'm glad you asked (even if you didn't). I teach HCP the process of how to add office ergonomic assessments, consultations, and trainings to their deliverables via how to do thorough office ergonomic assessments. I'll get into exactly what this means at the end of this post, but I just wanted to let you know how I've 'seen the light' of the value that learning how to do quality office ergonomic assessments can have on a business. 

I've been in the ergonomics industry for more than a decade, working in almost all there is to offer - prevention, return-to-work, disability management, just to name a few. I am a Board Certified Professional Ergonomist with a MSc in Ergonomics too - I have oodles of information and strategies that I want to share with you. 

I've noticed with talking to my past students that there are huge fallacies that prevented them from taking the necessary steps towards adding office ergonomics assessments, consultations, and trainings to their business by (literally) years! And this is what I want to share with you in this post. Mostly because it's just dang interesting, and secondly I hope that I can positively affect some part of your business with some of the key findings.

How Ergonomics Fits Into Your Scope 

I want to start from square one. For many HCP in the world today - Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Kinesiologist, Chiropractors, Nurses, etc is what sets you apart is that you already have the educational background in anatomy, physiology, and injury causation, to form the foundation to do really great ergonomic assessments. 

You may not actually have any experience with ergonomics but the fact that you already have the relevant education behind you PLUS real-world experience in your specific health profession is the most important part here. 

... really all you'd need to successfully add ergonomics services and deliverables are the tactics and process. Isn't that cool? I hope you see how this is already coming together for you.

So I would argue that any HCP has a solid foundation for successful ergonomic assessments. 

Let's take Occupational Therapists for instance. They have the practical and academic training as the educations focuses how people relate to their environments and the work they do. It works so well with the outcome of ergonomics that we are trying to achieve with office ergonomic assessments, consultations, and trainings.  

All Or Nothing 

So, since we're talking opportunity in this blogpost. The biggest one I see is that it has to do with adding ergonomics to your services in with an 'all-or-nothing' perspective. 

This means that there is common ground here between what you are already doing as a HCP and ergonomics services. Adding ergonomics as a service deliverable does NOT have to be black and white - or take up all of your time.

Rather, it depends on what you enjoy doing, what you WANT to be doing with your time, and what makes the most sense from the business perspective. And if you've always been curious or have already seen the value with adding ergonomics to your services, I believe that it's never been a better time to get into this. To reiterate, ergonomics adds a valuable piece of the prevention puzzle to many HCPs and many clients already need, want, and desire.

Some HCP operate with 1-2 days a week dedicated to ergonomics assessments, consultations, and trainings. For others it's once per month. There is literally so much potential here!

To put this in perspective, it can be quite profitable to add ergonomics services to your deliverables. Depending on your competence, expertise, and the market you live in, you can charge between $250 and $1,200 for a 1-on-1 'typical' office ergonomic assessment that would likely take 1-2 hours of work to complete (includes assessment, report, and travel). I'm gonna let that sink in a bit. 

So, What's Next? 

There's an incredible opportunity to get started doing office ergonomic assessments for all HCPs. As I mentioned in this post, I teach other HCPs how to add ergonomics to their deliverables. The Ergonomics Blueprint opens for enrolment soon, and you can click this link to join the waitlist.