Looking After Your Clinical Team Means Taking the Admin Off Their Plate
Every clinician I've worked with over the last twenty five years trained for the same reason, which is that they wanted to look after patients, and I don't think a single one of them sat in medical school imagining they'd spend a big chunk of their week fighting with claiming codes or chasing referral paperwork or trying to sort out a recall system that's fallen three months out of date, and yet that's where so many of them end up, doing work that has nothing to do with why they chose this in the first place and everything to do with nobody ever properly working out who else could be doing it instead.
I don't think practice owners fully appreciate how much this actually costs, and I don't mean in hours, I mean in the person underneath the role. A GP who's spending an hour of every consulting day fighting with paperwork isn't just an hour behind on patients, they're an hour more tired and an hour more frustrated and an hour further away from the version of themselves who chose this work because they wanted to sit with people and genuinely help them, and that gap between why someone became a clinician and what their actual day looks like is one of the quietest drivers of burnout I see across this sector. It's quieter than workload in the obvious sense too, because it was never really about how much they're doing, it's about how much of what they're doing was never supposed to be theirs to begin with.
Here's the frustrating part though. Most of this admin doesn't need a clinical brain at all, and once you actually sit down and map out what's eating a clinician's time, you find a surprising amount of it turns out to be work that a well trained administrator could do just as well, sometimes better, because they're not trying to squeeze it in sideways between consultations. Claiming and coding, chasing results, managing recalls, working through the back and forth of referrals, keeping records tidy enough to survive an audit, none of that needs a medical degree, it needs attention and consistency and someone whose actual job it is to hold that ball day in day out, and when you hand that over properly to the right person or the right system you're not just clearing hours off a roster, you're giving your clinicians back the part of their day that made the job feel worth doing in the first place.
I do want to be careful here, because I'm not talking about handing over anything that needs clinical judgement, and knowing exactly where that line sits matters enormously, because getting it wrong the other way and pushing genuinely clinical decisions onto non clinical staff to save time creates a completely different and much more serious problem. The real skill is being precise about the split, being honest about which tasks actually require a clinician's training and which ones only feel like they do because they've always been done that way in your practice, and once you separate those two categories properly you almost always find the second pile is far bigger than anyone assumed going in.
There's a financial argument in here too, and it's worth spelling out plainly because it tends to be the one that gets an owner's attention fastest, which is that your clinician's time is the most expensive resource sitting inside your practice, and every hour of it spent on administrative work that someone else could be doing on a fraction of that rate is money quietly walking out the door twice over, once in the cost of that clinician's wasted time and again in the consulting capacity that hour could have generated instead. Practices that actually sort this out don't just end up with happier clinicians, they end up seeing more patients, generating more revenue, and running a team that isn't hollowed out by Thursday afternoon.
But underneath the financial case is the human one, and honestly it's the one I care about most. Looking after your clinical team was never a wellness initiative you bolt on with a morning tea or a poster about mental health in the staff room, it's a structural decision about what you're actually asking them to spend their working life doing, and if the honest answer is that a meaningful chunk of that is admin someone else could and should be handling, then looking after your team means fixing that properly rather than hoping resilience training quietly makes up the difference. Your clinicians didn't sign up to become part time administrators, and a practice that lets that happen year after year without ever redesigning the workload isn't just losing efficiency, it's slowly using up the very people it depends on the most.