Playbook, physiotherapy clinic
Directions for a physio clinic, written for somebody in pain
Everywhere else this is a convenience question. Here it is a clinical one. The person asking may not be able to manage stairs, may not be able to walk from a car park, and may be booked into a building that is not the one on your contact page.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for location and parking holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A large share of these clinics sit on a first floor above a shop or an office, so the number of stairs and whether there is a lift is the fact that decides whether an appointment can happen at all.
- The rehab gym or class studio is often at a second address, and somebody booked for a class who arrives at the treatment rooms has lost the session, which is a mistake unique to sites that split the two.
- Distance from parking to the door is a real constraint rather than a comfort, because the person asking may be in a boot, on crutches or in acute back pain, and two hundred metres is not a detail to them.
- Being dropped at the door, and whether there is anywhere to stop for a minute, is asked constantly here and almost never covered on a contact page written for the able bodied.
How it arrives
- is there parking right outside
- how many stairs are there to the clinic
- is the gym at the same address as the clinic
- how far is the car park from your door
- can someone drop me at the front
- is there a lift up to the treatment rooms
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The approach to the door, described honestly | The entrance, the number of flights, whether there is a handrail, whether there is a lift and whether it is shared with the business downstairs. Written as somebody with a knee injury would need to read it. |
|---|---|
| Every address you treat from | Clinic, gym, studio and any hosted site, each with which services run there. One address on a contact page is what sends class bookings to the wrong building. |
| Parking, with distances and restrictions | On site bays, the nearest car park, time limits, and any accessible bay. Distance from the door matters more than price to the people asking this. |
| Drop off and the nearest stopping point | Where a car can pull in, and whether the driver can wait. Worth stating even if the answer is that they cannot, because the alternative is somebody circling in pain. |
The reply
The clinic is on the first floor and reached by a flight of stairs from the street door, with a handrail on the right and no lift [1]. There is a drop off point directly outside where a car can stop briefly, and the nearest car park is the one named on our contact page [2]. If stairs are a problem for you at the moment, say so when you book and the team will talk through the options with you.
The stairs are the first thing said, because for this reader they are the whole answer and burying them is a wasted journey. The drop off comes before the car park, since anybody who cannot walk far needs that fact more. The closing line points at a human decision instead of promising an adjustment the assistant cannot arrange.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks whether they personally will manage the stairs given their injury, or asks for a ground floor room to be arranged for their appointment.
Whether the stairs will work for you, and whether we can move you downstairs, is for the clinic to decide rather than me. Leave your name and an email with a note of the appointment and they will sort it out with you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say the clinic is accessible without naming the stairs or the lift, because that word means different things to the person asking and to the person answering.
- Never say a described injury will manage the stairs or the walk from the car park.
- Never give the clinic address to somebody asking about a class held at the gym.
- Never say a parking space will be free, since the assistant cannot see a car park.
Questions
- Is it not off putting to lead with the stairs?
- It is more off putting to find them on the day. Somebody who knows in advance can ask for an alternative or bring somebody with them, and the ones who cannot manage them were never going to be treated upstairs anyway.
- Two addresses feels like a small detail. Is it?
- Not to the person standing outside the wrong door at the start of a class. If services run from more than one building, every piece of indexed material should name which one it is talking about.
- Can it check whether the accessible bay is free?
- No. It has no view of anything outside your published pages, so it can say a bay exists and where it is, and nothing about whether a car is in it.
Keep reading
- Everything for a physiotherapy clinicSession prices, referral rules and what to wear are safe to automate. Exercise advice and injury assessment are not.
- Handling location and parking in generalWhich entrance, where to park, the step free route, the nearest stop. Genuinely useful information that is almost never written down well.
- When a physio complaint arrives with a symptom inside itHandling a complaint about physiotherapy when the message also reports a symptom, and naming the regulator route.
- What a physio clinic is actually holding when it takes money up frontMoney taken before treatment at a physio clinic, and why an insurer will not pay the fee for a missed session.
- Putting a figure on rehab when nobody has assessed the patient yetCase managers, solicitors and employers want a rehab cost in writing. What can be estimated before an assessment.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.