Last year we issued a cheeky postcard reminding you not to bury your head in the sand and pretend that compliance would go away. We compared an IP’s view of an ostrich-like director with an unflattering view of an IP taking the same approach to regulatory compliance.
Without the pretty pictures, we want to return to that theme now. Even with Rob on board, we are virtually full for this year. We can still jam a couple of visits in at short notice for those in dire straits, but realistically, we need you to look ahead to 2009 and start taking positive steps to book us now.
We rely on you getting in touch to book visits when you are ready for us, but compliance is always a job that looks better from afar and so has a tendency to be ignored. As a result we get several calls a year from IPs who either want a visit when it is too late and their regulator is on the doorstep, or have been ordered to have a visit because so much was found on a regulatory visit. The latter is often particularly time pressured if the IP’s licence has been restricted until they can demonstrate sufficient improvement.
With the need to draw up plans, report on visits and provide our now legendary back-up and technical advice service, we can only be in your practices on visits for around 30 to 40 working days in each month. With most IPs tending to book 2 or more days per visit, this means that we can only help around 15 to 20 IPs a month and after over three years in operation, we have a significant number of regular clients that already fill those slots.
It takes a brave IP to overcome the feeling that everything is alright and compliance can wait. We know that everyone needs a visit and those who use us have all been surprised at just how much we find for them to fix each time. As a result, visits are best booked regularly for short periods, allowing you to fix what we find before we come up with a new raft of deficiencies to sort out.
Most of our time on visits is spent looking at files and checking evidence, so the best times to get us in are when you are not around or when you have other meetings booked. That way, we can get on with the visit and issue the report later when you are available to deal with it. As long as we can get at the files and a regular supply of coffee, it may be best to choose times when you don’t want to have any real work on...such as the week before Christmas or the first week back in the New Year...or when you will be away on your skiing trip...or when your kids want a lift back to university...or when there is an interesting documentary on day time telly about cooking with woodlice!
Please contact Bill now if you are thinking about a visit before June 2009. If you leave it too long, you may miss out, with potentially costly consequences.
