Busy in Clinic, Shifting in the Background
Physio First Member Update
It’s been one of those weeks.
Back into clinical work after Easter and, from what I’m hearing, plenty of you are working through a backlog too. It’s a useful reset. Patients aren’t thinking about policy, AI or system design. They just want to be seen, understood and helped forward.
That’s still where the value sits.
At the same time, there’s quite a lot shifting in the background.
You may have seen some of the headlines:
- Spire takeover talks collapsing. A sign that confidence and investment in parts of the private hospital sector are not straightforward
- Medbelle ceasing trading after a hospital group stopped accepting its patients
- Welbeck expanding beyond London
- Renaiss Health building rehab capacity
- Bupa moving into genomics-led prevention
None of these on their own are dramatic. Together they show a market that is still evolving and not always predictable.
For independent physios, that matters. Referral routes shift. Relationships change. Opportunities appear, but so do gaps.
Last week I joined a webinar with Harvinder Power and Tim Allardyce, hosted by Physio Matters, looking at AI.
It was a really grounded discussion. AI isn’t the clinical work. But it can support what sits around it. Notes, communication, structuring information. That gives you more time to actually be with the patient. Worth engaging with, but keep a critical eye.
You can watch the full webinar here.
On the business side, we’ve got some useful webinars coming up, including one on the 20th April focused on GDPR. Not glamorous, but important. More of you are using digital tools and holding more data across more platforms. Getting this right is part of running a solid practice.
AXA is still ongoing
Please keep feeding in anything you are seeing. Deregistrations, session limits, odd communications. It all helps build the picture. What feels like an individual issue often isn’t.
Keep talking to us
If something feels off in your local area, with an insurer, software you’re using, or just in how things are shifting, let us know.
Problems with systems, processes, or anything causing friction day to day are just as important. If we don’t hear it, we don’t know about it. A lot of what we are picking up starts with those early conversations.
Final thought
There is a lot of noise at the moment.
But strip it back:
good access
clear thinking
doing the right thing for the patient
That still cuts through.