Playbook, physiotherapy clinic
One word, two requests, and only one of them is arithmetic
A request for a refund on four unused sessions is a calculation against your block terms. A request for a refund because the treatment did not help is a clinical dispute wearing the same word, and it needs a completely different reply.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for refund requests holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Unused sessions and unhelpful treatment arrive under the same word and are not remotely the same request: one is worked out from published terms, the other is a judgement about care that only a person can make.
- Blocks are sold at a discount against the single session price, so a partial refund is usually calculated by re-pricing the sessions already taken at the full rate, and almost nobody expects that arithmetic.
- Where an insurer funded the treatment, any refund goes back to the insurer rather than to the patient, which patients rarely anticipate and which changes the whole tone of the conversation.
- Physiotherapy is time delivered rather than a product returned, so a refund on sessions that actually happened is a discretionary decision by the practice, and an assistant that implies otherwise has committed the clinic to something.
How it arrives
- can i get a refund for the sessions i did not use
- the physio did not help can i have my money back
- how is a refund on a block worked out
- does the refund come to me or go to my insurer
- i paid for a class i could not attend
- can i have the assessment fee back
What has to be indexed for this to work
| How a partial block refund is calculated | Including whether sessions already taken are re-priced at the single session rate. Publish the method, because the method is the part that causes the argument, not the decision. |
|---|---|
| Where a refund goes when an insurer paid | Stated plainly in your terms. It saves a difficult conversation at exactly the moment somebody is already unhappy about their treatment. |
| Who reviews a refund request about the treatment itself | A named role, and whether a clinician is involved. Naming somebody turns a refusal into a route, and this request needs a route more than most. |
| Class and course payment terms | Whether a missed class is refundable, transferable to another date, or lost. Different from clinical session terms and worth its own paragraph. |
The reply
It depends which of two things you are asking about. For sessions left in a block, our terms set out how a partial refund is worked out, and sessions already taken are usually re-priced at the standard rate first, which is where the figure comes from [1]. If your treatment was funded by an insurer, any refund goes back to them rather than to you [2]. If this is about the treatment itself rather than unused sessions, that needs the clinic to look at properly, so leave me your name, an email and what happened.
It sorts the request before answering, because answering the wrong one of these is worse than not answering. The re-pricing method is stated up front, since the surprise is what people object to rather than the amount. The dispute half is routed to a person immediately, with no attempt to explain or defend anything.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks for money back because treatment did not work, made them worse, or was not what they expected.
That is not something I can decide or work out. Give me your name, an email and a short account, and the clinic will look at it and come back to 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 a refund will be given, or how much one would be.
- Never say whether a course of treatment was appropriate, sufficient or successful.
- Never say a refund has been processed or that money is on its way.
- Never suggest more sessions as a response to somebody saying the treatment did not help.
Questions
- Why publish the re-pricing method?
- Because the objection is nearly always to the surprise rather than to the sum. Somebody who knew when they bought the block that taken sessions get re-priced argues far less when the figure arrives.
- Should it ever discuss whether the treatment worked?
- Never. That is a clinical judgement about care already given, and an assistant that comments on it has both exceeded what it can know and weakened the clinic's position before anybody has reviewed the case.
- What about somebody who just missed a class?
- That is the easy one, and it should be answerable from your class terms outright. Keeping class terms separate from clinical block terms is what allows a plain answer instead of a hedge.
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 refund requests in generalA refund question is really about eligibility and timing. What to index, what the reply may promise, and where it has to reach a person.
- The Saturday night message a physio widget must not try to answerPain after a session arriving out of hours is clinical, and physiotherapy has no emergency service to hand it to.
- Insurance questions before a first physiotherapy appointmentRegistration, authorisation codes and session limits. The insurance answer that decides whether a physio books.
- Quoting a physiotherapy session price without predicting a recoverySomebody asking what a physio session costs is really asking what getting better costs. Answering both honestly.
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.