Before you hire another clinician, hire yourself some breathing space
By Jill Woods | Healthcare Marketing Specialist | Practice Momentum
In this post
- Why hiring a clinician first often adds to your workload rather than easing it
- How admin support frees up both appointments and evenings
- Why your admin person can transform how patients experience your practice
- Flexible ways to get support, including a little help from AI
- How to set your first helper up to shine from day one
Upfront honesty: I use AI to help me research and write my blog posts and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It saves me time, helps me find and reference evidence I might otherwise have missed, and means my dyslexic brain can produce more detailed, well structured content far more efficiently than it could alone. The result, I hope, is higher quality thinking delivered more consistently. I'll let you be the judge. 👍🏼
After years of working with small practice owners, I’ve noticed that the ones who make the biggest leap forward are often not the ones who hire another clinician as soon as they feel they are overwhelmed with patients - which is the most common pattern. More often, it’s the ones who get some admin support in place, even just a few hours a week, and find themselves with the breathing space to think, plan and actually enjoy their practice again - they tend to thrive the most.
I’ve seen plenty of owners take the other route, hiring a clinician first because it feels like the obvious way to grow. I totally get that. The extra income is welcome, but with more patients comes more admin and that extra workload usually lands squarely on the owner’s shoulders, and the relief they were hoping for never quite materialises.
So if you’re at the point where you know you need help, I’d love you to consider making admin support your first hire. It can be genuinely revolutionary for a small practice, and you don’t need a big team, a big budget or a spare desk to do this.
Every patient appointment comes with admin wrapped around it. Somebody needs to answer the enquiry, explain how the practice works, book the right appointment and make sure the patient has everything they need, and then there are forms to chase, appointments to rearrange and payments to process.
A new clinician will take care of their own clinical work and records, but unless you’ve agreed otherwise, they won’t arrive ready to manage the inbox, answer everyone’s calls or organise the diary. If all of that currently comes back to you, another clinician simply gives more people a reason to come back to you, and you end up supporting their diary while trying to keep your own afloat.
That’s how so many practice owners end up working a second shift. You finish treating patients, come home and open the laptop at the kitchen table while dinner, family and the rest of your life wait patiently in the background (or not so patiently). Your evenings are part of your life, and they should not be an endless supply of free labour for the practice.
So here’s the encouraging part. Before you pay somebody else to see more patients, there’s a good chance you already have extra clinical capacity hiding in your own week.
If several hours disappear into work somebody else could handle, handing that over can create room for more appointments and improved cashflow without adding a single person to the clinical team. It can also give you time to improve the patient experience, strengthen your referral relationships and make better decisions about where the practice is heading.
At the same time, somebody giving proper attention to enquiries and bookings can help far more patients take that next step. Following up a message promptly, offering a suitable appointment and keeping a cancellation list organised are exactly the jobs that slip when you’re busy treating, and they’re the jobs that keep your diary healthy. Admin isn’t something you can only afford once everything else is sorted, because it’s part of how your practice earns and keeps its income.
There’s another reason I get excited about admin support, and it’s one that often gets overlooked. Your admin person can often be the first voice a new patient hears or the first friendly face they meet, which means they shape how patients feel about your practice before you’ve even said hello.
When somebody has the time to answer calls warmly, reply to messages promptly and remember the little details, patients feel looked after from the very first contact. That sense of being cared for builds trust, encourages people to book and makes them far more likely to recommend you. Good admin support isn’t just a back-office cost; it’s a genuine part of the care your practice provides.
Here’s how to work it out
“I can’t afford admin help” is one of the most common things I hear, so I want us to take a closer look before you accept it as the final answer. Most practice owners are picturing a full-time employed receptionist, when what they actually need might just be a few hours of focused help each week, someone to answer calls while they’re treating, or someone to tame the inbox so routine questions stop interrupting every spare moment.
It’s well worth doing a quick sum. Work out roughly what the support you need would cost, then look at what you’d do with the time it releases. If you’re planning to fund it through extra appointments, use what’s left from each appointment after your costs rather than the full fee, and think about how many of those extra slots you could realistically fill.
Equally, you might decide that some of the time is for a proper lunch break, the school run or finishing work at a sensible hour. That’s a perfectly valid return on your investment too, because your practice is supposed to support a richer life, and you get to decide what that looks like.
A tiny practice can absolutely have admin support. You don’t need multiple treatment rooms or a large team before somebody can take useful work off your hands, and the right starting point simply depends on where you most need help.
You don’t have to work through these options in order. Choose the support that fits the work you need doing now, and adapt as your practice develops.
1. Call answering and booking service
If phone calls are your biggest interruption, this can be a brilliant first step. Depending on the service and its access to your diary, somebody can answer calls, book appointments, take messages and handle agreed routine questions while you concentrate on the patient in front of you.
Give them clear guidance on appointment types, prices and common questions, along with anything that needs referring back to you. They also need to know exactly where their responsibility ends, particularly when a caller asks for clinical advice.
2. A virtual assistant
A VA can take on work that doesn’t need somebody physically in the practice, such as managing your inbox, organising appointments, preparing documents and keeping routine business tasks moving. You can begin with a small set of tasks and agreed hours, then build from there once you’ve seen what a difference it makes.
3. Somebody working locally
Some practices need a mixture of remote and hands-on help. A local assistant might handle paperwork, stock checks and deliveries on site alongside work they can do from home, which is ideal when you need someone in the practice for part of the week but aren’t ready for regular reception cover.
4. A receptionist or practice administrator
As your workload grows, and if your premises have suitable space, somebody based in the practice may become the right choice. They can welcome patients, take payments, manage enquiries and help the whole day run more smoothly for you and your patients.
5. A little help from AI
If you’ve already dabbled with Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude, you’ll know how much time they can save on the jobs that eat into your evenings. I use AI tools in my own business every day, and I’m a big fan of them as a way to get past the blank page and take the repetitive work off your plate. For a tiny practice, they can be a brilliant first step towards feeling less alone with the admin.
At a simple, everyday level, practice owners are using these tools to:
- Draft friendly replies to routine enquiries and build a bank of email templates
- Turn rough notes or a quick voice memo into a polished email, patient information sheet or SOP
- Create first drafts of blogs, newsletters and social posts
- Summarise long documents, guidance or meeting notes into something you can read in two minutes
- Tidy up spreadsheets and pull together simple reports
- Brainstorm ideas when your brain has well and truly clocked off for the day
If your practice already runs on Microsoft 365, it’s worth knowing that Copilot now comes built into some of Microsoft’s small business plans and works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, so the help sits right where you’re already working.
There is one golden rule, though - please don’t paste identifiable patient information into a free or personal AI account. The free and personal versions of these tools may use what you type to improve their models unless you change your settings, while the business versions don’t by default, but even then you still need to be confident that how you use them meets your GDPR obligations and your professional body’s expectations. The ICO website is the best place to start if you’re unsure, and keeping patient details out of AI altogether is the simplest way to stay safe.
The other thing to remember is that AI is a fabulous assistant but a terrible manager. It needs somebody to brief it properly, check what it produces, keep everything sounding like you and actually get the work out of the door. That’s why it works best alongside human support rather than instead of it, and it’s exactly how we use it in Admin Magic, combining the speed of AI with real people who know your practice and care about getting it right.
Admin Magic is our marketing admin support service, designed to keep your marketing moving even when your diary is full of patients. Most practice owners know they should be blogging, sending newsletters and showing up consistently online, but when clinical work comes first (as it should), marketing is usually the first thing to slide. We take care of the practical work behind it, so your practice keeps attracting the right patients without you burning the midnight oil.
Because marketing touches almost every part of a practice, from your website and reviews to your pricing and the way things run behind the scenes, our support naturally stretches into the office admin that keeps everything ticking along too.
On the marketing side, we can help with:
- Writing blogs, social posts and other content in your voice
- Setting up a digital newsletter and keeping it going
- Creating a branding guide so your marketing always looks and sounds like you
- Collecting testimonials and online reviews, responding to them and turning them into patient stories
- Cataloguing your photos so the right image is always easy to find
- Keeping your website up to date
On the office side, we can help with:
- Managing your inbox and building a bank of email templates for the questions that come up again and again
- Shifting that backlog of filing, or the patient letters that have been piling up
- Setting up and documenting your processes and creating SOPs
- Organising invoices, following up payments and preparing your books for your accountant
- Calculating your running costs to inform your pricing, and handling the practical side of a price increase
- Managing CPD bookings and training records if you have a team
Some of this works best as ongoing support, while other jobs are one-off projects that clear the decks and give you a fresh start. You don’t need to hand everything over at once, and starting with one project or a few clearly defined tasks makes it easier to build confidence, enjoy the benefits and decide what you’d love to delegate next.
Support works best when somebody knows what you need, how you’d like it done and when to ask for help. They can’t read your mind, however lovely and capable they are, but the good news is that you don’t need a perfectly organised practice before you begin. Getting the first few tasks ready properly is more than enough to make a great start.
☐ Spot the work you're ready to hand over. Keep a simple note for a week of recurring tasks, interruptions and jobs you keep putting off.
☐ Pick your first priorities. Choose a manageable handful of tasks that would make a real difference to your workload or your patients.
☐ Decide what success looks like. Be clear about the result you want, such as enquiries answered within an agreed time or a finance summary ready each month.
☐ Show them how you like it done. A quick checklist, short screen recording or worked example explains a task without turning it into a manual (they can do that for you later).
☐ Set clear boundaries. Explain what they can decide on their own and what needs your approval or clinical judgement, and make sure they have secure access to what they need, with confidentiality arrangements in place.
☐ Agree how you’ll stay in touch. A regular check-in lets you answer questions, refine instructions and celebrate the work that’s coming off your plate.
And if writing processes down feels like one more job on the list, you don’t have to do it all yourself before you’re allowed to delegate. Getting help to document them is a perfectly good first task in its own right.
I really believe that getting admin support in place first gives you the breathing space to run your practice well, and it gives any clinician you hire later a far stronger practice to join. Growth feels very different when you’re not the one holding every single thread together.
There are a few practices with efficient admin and a genuine need for more clinical capacity, where another clinician may well be the right first hire. For most small practice owners though, the real breakthrough comes from lightening the load they’re already carrying. [For more on this take a look at another blog post - Why I don't want you to scale your practice]
So before you ask, “Who could see more patients?”, try asking, “What needs to come off my plate so this practice can work better for me?” If you’d like help answering that, book a call with us and we’ll talk through what’s taking up your time and where Admin Magic could make the biggest difference.
Call us for help with your practice admin - +44 (0)1953 433 588
OK that's it for my thoughts on your first practice hire.
Thank you soooo much for taking the time to stop by my healthcare marketing blog today. I really hope you found value in spending some time here today.
I’d be so grateful if you could spare me just another 5 minutes to share your thoughts or questions in the box at the end of this page. What are you going to do differently now in your private practice?
Oh, and please use the social share buttons if you think other people you know might benefit from seeing this.
Until next time.
Thank you
Jill Woods
Healthcare Marketing Specialist
Founder of Practice Momentum
Jill Woods
Healthcare Marketing Specialist | Founder, Practice Momentum | Author of ELEVATE
I started Practice Momentum in 2010 after watching too many brilliant clinicians quietly burning out — not because they were bad at their jobs, but because nobody had ever taught them how to run or market a small business. Since then, I've helped hundreds of tiny practice owners around the world build practices that are professionally exciting, personally fulfilling, and financially rewarding. I'm the author of ELEVATE: Mindset, Marketing and Happiness Strategies for Allied Health Practice Owners, a podiatrist turned healthcare marketing specialist, a speaker, a nomadic military wife, and a self-confessed happiness junky. I believe tiny practices have the power to change healthcare globally - and I'm on a mission to help as many of them as possible thrive.
