The team at the HR in Practice service has recently received a number of enquiries from members regarding the ‘cashing out’ of long service leave (LSL).

Specifically, this involves being paid out LSL as a financial sum in place of taking time off. This is not the same as being paid out leave when leaving a job.

You have probably seen a lot of changes in our industry in the last 25 years but, more recently, the times are a changing and, thankfully, the corporates are coming.

To give you some context, in 2018 after 20-plus years of growing a large group of physiotherapy clinics, my business partner and I decided it was time to leave the party.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the employment landscape was evolving.

Many workers now value non-monetary benefits such as flexibility and a healthy workplace over the traditional monetary-based incentives that previously reigned supreme.

Burnout is the term used for a state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion driven by chronic workplace stress.

Burnout can also have a major effect on the way we work. It can impact on our sense of job satisfaction, ability to concentrate, and how effective we are.

Those who experience burnout often report depleted energy levels, changes in mood, and increased negativity or cynicism.

I became a physiotherapist because I wanted to make a difference to people. Straight out of university, in 1999, I worked in a combination of private practice and hospital work for a couple of years, combined with some sports trainer work with local sporting clubs.

The work was good; I learnt from great physiotherapists, people would come to see us because they were in pain, and we might have made them feel a bit better.

Contractor versus employee

The post-COVID-19 private practice will look considerably different for many clinics, and technology will have an evolving role in the practice of the future. This month, Stephen King joins the APA in presenting a webinar on how to embrace the technological changes for a better client outcome. 

When Stephen King and his business partner Andrew Lemon opened their suburban Melbourne physiotherapy practice in 2016, a key foundation of the clinic’s operation was the uptake of technology.

For the next generation of physiotherapists to be able to graduate, and to allow them the best education they can have in private practice, requires an unprecedented approach, a blend of online and social- distanced consultations, mixed with less hands-on work and more clinical reasoning.

Across allied health, including private physiotherapy clinics, there is not one clear method of digitally collecting standardised outcome measures from patients.

There has been a seemingly endless series of underpayment scandals that have rocked the Australian industrial relations landscape. While larger organisations have primarily been in the firing line, small-to-medium-sized businesses are not immune from attracting the attention of the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Finding the right award is critical