When I stopped practising law full-time to become an allied health professional, lots of people – understandably – had questions. Some colleagues asked me straight out: why throw away more than 15 years of legal and compliance experience to work in a completely different field?
I never looked at it that way. Beneath the surface, both professions are about people, good communication, and building trust; about doing the work for clients, and striving to get better every day. About being an ethical professional in an imperfect world.
Both professions – law and speech pathology – give me enormous joy: an opportunity to use my skills to push myself out of my comfort zone, and to help others to achieve their goals.
Every now and then my two skill-sets intersect in interesting ways. A good example is my recent NDIS template writing:
- as a lawyer, I know how to read the legislation;
- as a speech pathologist, I know how to translate legislation, guidelines and rules into readable policies; and
- as a small speech pathology practice owner, I know that our resources are limited, that few of us are in practice to make millions, and that margins are tight.
With my wife (and fellow lawyer), we started Speechies in Business way back in 2015 to support Australian speech pathologists in private practice with high quality, inexpensive templates, precedents and other resources.
In 2018, we started hearing from Australian Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, Dietitians, Podiatrists, Chiropractors, and Exercise Physiologists asking whether our templates could be used to support their practices, despite our speech-related name! They could.
In 2019, we heard from NDIS providers of all kinds to see whether we could support them with template documents to help with NDIS compliance, NDIS verification, and NDIS audits.
Initially, we were reluctant to do so – we wanted to focus on helping speech pathologists and other allied health professionals. But we kept hearing horror stories: about small NDIS providers being quoted thousands of dollars for basic templates – money they could use to invest in themselves to help their clients.
So, accidentally, we’ve become known for producing quality, inexpensive resources for small NDIS providers. And after literally hundreds of requests, we’re thrilled to launch a major new addition to our growing NDIS Template Library: The NDIS Risk Management System. Click on the button below to check it out
We hope you find it useful!
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