A week in the life of HealthyPractice

This month MAS and our team farewell Shaun Phelan as he and his wife begin their next adventure into retirement.  Shaun has worked for MAS for an amazing 45 years and our team along with many of our members have been both appreciative and grateful for the knowledge he has shared over the years.  We wish them both a long and happy retirement with lots of travel and time spent with family and friends.

We are pleased to introduce our new manager, Peter Lycett.  Pete has worked for MAS since 2012as a Senior Adviser, he has been absorbing Shaun’s knowledge over the past couple of weeks.  Pete is based in Auckland is looking forward to getting out and about and meeting our subscribers.

This month we thought we’d introduce you to a week in the life of the HealthyPractice team and do a bit of housekeeping. 

With the change in the team that means that Bonnie, Mychaela and Pete all work 5 days a week, 8.30am – 5pm and Fiona works Monday to Thursday 8am-4pm. 

Please always use business@mas.co.nz to email us – we have a shared inbox and if one of us is away, another team member will pick up your email, to make sure your queries are responded to in a timely way.

In March the HealthyPractice team had over 1,050 contacts with MAS members.

The majority of our contacts are via email which is great as it allows us to allocate them to the most suitable team member and it also gives us a chance to complete a little research prior to responding – we can always phone you if a discussion would be helpful.  We aim to respond same day to emails received prior to midday, and the following morning for those received after midday, unless an urgent response is needed.

So what does an average week look like for us?

• We review about 50-60 Individual Employment Agreements, contracts for service and letters of offer. Things we commonly adjust include:
  • Agreement type e.g. fixed term, or casual that should be permanent part time
  • Hours of work
  • Trial period dates – remember the notice period can be shorter for this and we recommend 3 days to one week.
  • Letter of offer details don’t match the IEA
• We typically have about 5 to 10 disciplinary processes on the go with practices at any one time. As anyone who has been through this will know it is stressful and time consuming. We have some great guidance notes on co.nz - please give us a call if you wish to discuss this process further. Our common messages are:
  • No predetermined view going into the process
  • Process and actions must be seen to be fair and reasonable
  • You can’t revisit issues from ages ago that were (or even weren’t) dealt with back then
  • Be timely and document your process well
  • Letter inviting an employee to a disciplinary meeting must detail all concerns with the evidence to support them, advise of potential outcomes, and allow time for employee to seek advice and have support or representation at the meeting
  • If issuing a warning or worse, then give it as a potential outcome to allow time for final responses to be considered before providing a final outcome
  • If you hold employment disputes insurance notify your insurer before doing anything.
• On average we discuss and support 25 subscriber practices with staff performance each week.
  • Dealing with issues early – might stop it from becoming habitual
  • Document and follow a fair process
  • Call us to discuss as you need.
• Shaun (and now Pete) will deal with about 5-10 practice ownership queries, this can be from those looking to buy a practice, sell a practice, or wanting to look at succession planning or the ownership structure and practice agreement for their current practice. Definitely worth a chat with Pete if any of these things are on your radar!
• We also answer queries about leave and pay, recruitment, restructures, resignation and termination, Privacy and Health information privacy.
• Bonnie and Mychaela do an amazing job supporting subscribers with HealthyPractice tutorials – particularly useful for new owners, managers, and team leaders. Done by phone/Zoom/MS teams these take around 30 minutes, covering the most used parts of the website, with even long-time users finding something new. Email business@mas.co.nz to book one in.
• Fiona provides back up to the rest of the team. She champions our research and content management, regularly updating the HealthyPractice content along with writing HealthyPractice newsletters each month and articles for various sector publications. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we could add content about any employment or business areas.

Remember your subscription gives you unlimited business hours access to us, so don’t be shy - we’d love to hear from you too.