Maybe We Need Another Secretary.
Maybe We Need Another Secretary.
Maybe you do need another secretary.
The phones may be relentless. Patients may be waiting. Your front desk may genuinely have more work than one person can reasonably carry. That’s not something to dismiss.
But before you hire, there’s one question worth answering first: what exactly is overwhelming them?
“We’re overwhelmed” and “we need to hire” aren’t the same finding. One describes how the day feels. The other assumes you already know why — and that’s worth checking before it becomes a permanent line on payroll.
Look at what’s actually consuming the day. How much of it is judgment — reading a worried patient’s tone, deciding which of three problems to handle first, knowing when a rule should bend? Keep that human. Nobody should want to automate it away, and no clinic runs well without it.
How much of it, instead, is repeated information — the same details entered more than once because nothing carried them forward? How much is manual coordination that a system should be able to track on its own? How much is answering the same routine question, over and over, because there was never anywhere else for a patient to find the answer?
Adding another person can genuinely increase capacity. That’s true even in a clinic with process friction — a second pair of hands is still a second pair of hands. But if a meaningful share of the workload is coming from avoidable friction rather than the work itself, hiring doesn’t just add capacity. It also makes that friction more expensive, permanently, because now two salaries are absorbing it instead of one.
There’s a bigger question underneath this, too — not just whether one more hire would help, but whether every stage of your clinic’s growth should require another pair of hands just to keep the same processes moving. Because that, over time, is what determines how expensive your clinic becomes to grow.
Maybe the answer is another secretary. Maybe it isn’t. But “we’re overwhelmed” isn’t enough information to know which.
Before adding another person, look at the work itself. What genuinely requires human judgment? What’s being repeated only because of the way the clinic currently works? And what could disappear without anyone losing the human part of care?
Answer those first. Then decide whether what you need is another person — or a better way for the people you already have to work.