Have you finished your training as a psychologist and want to take the big step? There are many exits after doing a career focused on mental health, you can manage organizations, make competitive examinations for a public square and, of course, you can open your own office psychological.
It may seem like an impossible task at first, it is about starting a business from scratch and organizing everything with the tools that let us have at hand, think about whether you are going to work as a team or independently, manage legal licenses, look for potential patients... At Psychology-Online, we want to help you learn how to set up and manage a psychology office. For that reason, we offer you this article.
The first step to be able to work as a psychologist in your own practice is to start the project and do a list of objectives. It is difficult to follow a prescribed path and even more so if we are not used to starting a business, to know how to set up and manage a psychology office, you can follow the following steps:
1. Finish and complement your training
In most cases, a university degree is not enough to practice as a health psychologist. In Spain, for example, you must complete a specific master's degree and access the official college of psychologists. In the event that you decide not to do a master's degree, keep in mind that you will not be able to practice a health profession. In any case, your query could be directed to the educational, social or labor field.
The training may also include an internship period to gain experience and find out how treat your patients, think that you are working with people who deposit their mental health in your hands.
2. Find a place and enable the space
Psychotherapy sessions can be online or face-to-face, it is usually recommended to do them in person, since communication is more fluid and connects better with the patient. In this case, you must find the ideal place to mount your psychological cabinet. There are premises by hours and rental offices, choose the option that best suits your business idea.
3. Think about forming a team
Improving mental health is an approach work multidisciplinaryThis means that other professionals can intervene in the process of improvement and stability of the patient. Your psychological cabinet can be made up of other psychologists specialized in different areas, psychiatrists, speech therapists and even alternative therapists.
Think carefully about whether you want to form a team or, on the contrary, you prefer to work alone and avoid taking responsibility for the work management of other people. Every decision you make has its pros and cons, the choice in this case must be consistent with the expectations you have about your query.
4. Start the procedures
Before launching a business, you must have all the licenses in order, either the personal ones that prove that you are qualified to exercise such as legal and economic licenses. If you are not a person with experience or knowledge about bureaucratic procedures, it is better that you leave it in the hands of a management office.
5. Find your target audience
For a practice to work, you need patients to come to it. You must be clear that your main objective is to be able to offer help and support to people who need it. Your clients are patients and they are individuals who are going to need therapy, under that premise, think of the public whom you want to attract, what type of therapies are you better able to exercise and what services are you going to offer in your cabinet.
If you want to open a psychological office, you must bear in mind that one of the most important added values in a consulting room is the management capacity. While it is true that with patience and organization you can carry all the elements manually, there are specific management tools for a psychology office.
These management programs for psychologists, as the BEWE.io offers us, their main objective is to help us organize all the elements that our business contains: management of agendas, history file, patient monitoring and it even provides us with tools to improve our image for the general public.
It is advisable to use management software if you want to provide a quality service. Thanks to the rise of new technologies, we have such useful tools at our fingertips and we must make the most of them.
Once you are clear about all the steps to follow to have a consultation, you should know what requirements you need to finally open your own psychological office:
- Accreditation: As we have commented previously, the practice of psychological therapies is highly regulated to prevent it from being done incorrectly. That is why each country has specific internship licenses that you should consult before practicing as a psychologist.
- Motivation: it's going to be tough at first and that's something you should keep in mind, when we open a cabinet and start a business from scratch, It is difficult to balance the initial financial investment, you must have patience and motivation to be able to see how your draft.
- Customers: an essential requirement for the psychological consultation to work is to get clients to come to it. Not only because they provide you with financial support, having many clients will give you personal experience and, in this way, you can improve as a professional.
- Management capacity: once we have the business up and running, if we do not want to lose everything we have built, it is necessary to maintain a certain order. It is not easy to manage your company's agendas, patients, inventory or marketing, for that reason, good management of your psychological office will be an added value. If you want to optimize this requirement, you can use a management software as previously commented.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
