Pace MediSystems

When One Person Is Away and Everything Breaks — That Is Not an Absence Problem.

I was recently speaking with a former colleague now working in a specialist practice.

Since she started, there has not been a single full week with every team member present. Someone is always away.

Each time it happens, colleagues stay late. Tasks fall through gaps. The principal gets pulled back in. Staff arrive the next morning already behind.

She described it as exhausting. Not because the work is too hard. Because the practice has no capacity to absorb something as normal as one person being away.
That is not an absence problem. It is a systems problem that shows up every time someone is away.

Absence does not create fragility in a practice. It reveals the fragility that was already there.

What is the first thing that breaks in your practice when a key team member is away?

The Onboarding Problem Most Practices Don't Know They Have.

Most practices believe they have an onboarding process. What they actually have is 'ask Karen.'

The cost of that approach sits between $15,000 and $30,000 per failed hire when you count recruitment time, reduced productivity and the repeat cycle.

This carousel breaks it down — including what good onboarding actually looks like in a specialist practice and how to calculate your own cost.

Click the link to access the Full blog https://pacemedisystems.com.au/poor-onboarding-medical-practices/.

Save this before your next hire. Blog link in comments.

You Spent Three Months Finding Them. You Lost Them in Sixty Days.

The position was advertised for weeks. You reviewed applications, conducted interviews, checked references.

The right person accepted. You were relieved.

Then something shifted.

🔸By week 6 they were asking questions they should not still be asking.
🔸By week 10 errors were compounding.
🔸By week 12 they had resigned.

The practice concluded they were not the right fit.

In most cases, the fit was not the problem.

The onboarding was the problem.

Most small and medium specialist practices still rely on what I think of as the sit-beside model. The new person sits next to your most experienced staff member and watches. Then they start doing tasks. Then they are expected to be capable.

There is no documented process.

🔸No defined timeline.
🔸No structured 30-day or
🔸60-day framework.

No formal check-in to assess how they are actually tracking.

It feels low effort to set up. And it is. The cost arrives later usually around the 60-day mark, when a capable person exits a role they were never properly set up to succeed in.

Before your next hire, the question worth asking is not who. It is whether the onboarding experience you are offering gives the right person a genuine chance to stay.

How long does it take a new team member in your practice to genuinely feel confident in the role?

The Practice Looked Successful. The Team Was Exhausted.

There is a version of a good year that nobody celebrates.

Income held up. Patient demand was strong. From the outside the practice looked like it was firing on all cylinders.

But behind that result was a team that had been running on empty for months.
Not because they were not capable. Not because they did not care. Because the practice was delivering its results through effort rather than structure. Through people pushing harder rather than systems working smarter.

There is a quiet irony worth naming here.

Specialist practices exist to care for patients. Every system and every process is oriented around the patient experience. But somewhere in that focus, the impact on the people delivering that care gets overlooked.

An exhausted team makes more errors. Misses the deposit. Overlooks the expired referral. Does not follow up the health fund rejection because there is simply no capacity left at the end of the day.

There is also a harder truth. If the team does not feel the benefit of the results their effort produced, they will start to question why they are giving it. Staff who are consistently overloaded and unsupported do not stay. They leave. Taking their knowledge and capability with them.

You can sustain a practice on effort for a while. But not indefinitely.

At EOFY it is worth looking honestly at what this year's results actually cost.

Not just in income and expenditure. In the people who delivered them.

What is the cost of this year's results on the team that made them happen?