The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy

	Important new information about Reception Services & your account with The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy

	This document should be read in conjunction with your contact with us posted up at THIS LINK, and the note about NEW CHARGES. These links are all posted onto your members logon page.

	From a sometime in late January 2009 onwards start date, the reception service will start. Please see the document about that that has been posted up separately, and appears as a link on your 'members logon' page

	At first, the reception services will only be responsible for reception of your patients (all patients will be expected to report attendance to reception before their meeting with you), and for the concomitant update of your appointment manager record. They will also gain experience collecting patient fees remitted under the Low-Fee scheme, and we will have a period of training and ironing out glitches.

	When we are happy that they are fully up-to-speed and adjusted to that, the reception service will be asked to add-on the collection of patient's fee for therapists working in the Main Service programme as a front-of-house service. We anticipate that could be as early as the first week of March, and will certainly be no later than the first week of April 2009.

	Reception will take payment on behalf of The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy main programme therapists in the form of credit & debit card, and cheque backed by bank guarantee card. (also Postal Orders - see below)

	You are strongly advised to take a card payment from the patient at reception on your behalf, or to ask that the patient pays a cheque (made payable to The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy) to the receptionist, who will also ask to see the guarantee card and note those details.

	You can instruct reception on a case-by-case basis - some patients you might want to pay at reception, others you might want to pay only to you. Reception will be aware by a note on the patient's record when they receive the patient what it is that you want, and not bother the patient by asking them to pay if you are dealing with it yourself.

	Monies paid into your account at The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy will be credited into your personal bank account net of room charges and referral fees on the third day after you have worked your session; at 3pm UK time (seven days a week). The transaction will be electronic bank transfer from the main The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy account.

	It is three days because it allows time for cheques to 'bounce' if they are going to, and Don & Yoko will need to check through the referral fee periods to make an alteration to the amount should we need to reimburse you for patient's who have left treatment with F1 fees at under six sessions attended.

	When you finish the daily shift at The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, the reception area will already have prepared an envelope for you. This will contain an account of that days' activities. It will also be electronically mailed to you. As all the clinical rooms will have their own pc and broadband on 1st November, you can see that directly on the pc when you finish your 'shift'.

	The account will summarise the patients' who were booked in, their attendance status, and whether reception received payment from them. The account will summarise and calculate the total costs you have incurred that day for room charges and referral fees. The account will then 'net that off' - ie calculate - against the patient fees received at reception that day. So, each day you will know what amount The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy owes you - or how much you owe The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy: a final daily plus or minus position

	If you have insufficient funds received that day against amounts credited to your account with The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, you will be expected to leave your personal cheque at reception in that sum, or if the receptionist is available (she should be) then to make a credit/debit card payment to The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy to settle your daily account.

	In (what we think will be) usual circumstances, - meaning that if you have not taken mainly cash and personal cheques made out to you from the patient - your account for that day will be in credit with us, so the summary of that days activities will be more a checkable note of the amount that we will electronically transfer into your account the third day after your workday; at 3pm UK time (seven days a week). That means that you will have time to phone up Yoko or myself and let us know about any errors, so that the payment made is always accurate and agreed.

	We can do all of this because with the reception services we can be 100% sure that your appointment manager record is 100% correct. This should be an advance on the old system of drawing up your account (supposedly monthly) in arrears, where in practice no therapist except for one person - s/he knows who she is 'cos we have told him/her - has ever managed to achieve a faultless record, and Donald has had to spend inordinate amounts of time establishing by query an accurate(ish) retrospective statement of transactions.

	We will be moving over to a new appointment manager site shortly. What this will mean is that from the date that reception services are fully up-to-speed (around early December), we will apply all of these details, and the new daily accounting system. The 'old' appointment manager will remain online, with its records, as Donald struggles to establish the retrospective accounts under the current system.

	The day on which the reception service starts to take the group's patient payments is then 'year zero' for the new accounting system - and uncleared or unresolved matters from the old system will not be applied in that account of charges

	If you do not use reception to receive payment: about cash

	Reception will NOT take cash, nor personal cheques made out to your name. So, if it must be cash or cheques in your name, that can only be paid to you directly. The notion of a cash or cheque payment to you has a clear application in our account to you. It has a clear function in how we construct our account to you and charge out.

	Reception are instructed to prepare the account on the basis that if the patient has attended, and that reception has not received payment for that session, and that the patients record and payments log does not indicate that s/he is in credit for that session (ie has prepaid by making a monthly payment on account)
	- then the account is constructed on the basis that you have taken cash in person from that patient.

	What this means is that if you are taking receipt responsibility, it is entirely your business whether you have actually taken receipt, or whether the patient has left that session owing you money. We will not accept any explanation, nor complaint, that the payment was not actually received.

	If you are taking other forms of payment that reception can process, (Card, cheque, PO) referral fees will not be chargeable (in accordance with our published contract with you - see this link) if a patient doesn't pay up at that meeting. But, if you are taking cash, you must be aware that you alone run the risk that you have not received payment and we are varying the contract that we have with you ( see this link) so that it is treated at all times as if you have received payment and as if that session attended by the patient was chargeable for referral fees.

	About Postal Orders

	We are running this anyway for the Low-Fee scheme, where some patients do not have bank accounts. We are asking that if patient's do need to pay cash, then that they attend the Post Office in White Kennett Street (some three minutes walk away) - and purchase a Postal Order made out to The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy. I would suppose that 99% of your patients have cards & cheques, but if you needed to have this option, it is available for you to organise with your patient

	Summary

	In your existing practice, you have been taking payments directly from the patient. There is nothing about the new reception service that would stop you from doing that, you can carry on with your clinic and your patients just as before - the patient you are already receiving will not be aware that the structure of The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy has changed a bit.

	However, if you do carry on as before, and receive payment directly, you should expect to write The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy a cheque at the close of every working day that you have with The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, and you should be aware that how we record when a session is a chargeable session with respect to the referral fee that it attracts - then that the basis of that has changed. As discussed above - every patient session booked in with us, whether attended, badly cancelled or DNA'ed, will count as a chargeable session for referral fees irrespective of whether the patient has actually (or will in the future) pay you or not.

	Otherwise, it is possible for you to use the reception service, either on a wholesale or case-by-case basis, to receive payments from patients on your behalf. The usual contract conditions for room charges and for referral fees then apply.

	About the treatment of cancellations during referral fee periods

	It was always true that individual therapists had individual cancellation policies. That will remain true.

	You will be aware by separate email & postings that we will now publish full details of each therapists cancellation policy on the website, and provide a link to that with each email that we send the patent, This will stop misunderstandings and enable the patient to choose a therapist whose cancellation policy the patient an work with.

	This is about fees received for cancelled sessions during the referral fee period. In theory, we had always stipulated in our contract with you about referral fees that if the patient pays over to the therapist monies for late cancellations or DNA's or other kinds of missings, then if the therapist has received a payment that this counts for the accumulation of referral fees.

	In practice - no therapist has ever let us know if they received fees for late cancels, and in practice we only operated that idea when we marked up the session as 'late cancelled' or 'DNA'ed' in the appointment manager (as the therapist had not removed that session by cancelling it in the 48 hour notice period that applies to room charges). So, Therapist A had a policy of charging the patient fees if cancelling with less than 1 weeks notice, and Therapist A never declared that payment received for the purpose of the referral fee due.

	With the reception services, we are going to be able for the first time to apply your individual cancellation policy. We have to, if we are going to collect fees on your behalf! Therefore, we will not be marking up appointments as cancelled if the patient is cancelling outside the terms of your own individual policy, or if you yourself are cancelling outside those terms

	This will then leave the session as 'complete' on your appointment manager, in every case where a session falls cancelled outside of your own policy - ie in every case where you expect the patient to pay you a fee.

	What this means, and has always meant, is that the appointment manger IS NOT a record of your actual appointments with the patients, but it is and always was, a record of the transactions that we charge you - a record of the services that The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy provides you with.

	Something else needs to be made clear though. We contract with you, that if you let us know with 48 hours notice that you are not taking that room time, and that it is available for another therapist to use, then we will not charge you the room fee.

	So, the nuance is that the session will remain on your books as 'complete' if it is an incorrect cancel by your own cancellation policy in the referral fee period, but the room fee will not be charged.

	If we are collecting fees on your behalf at Reception, then the patient record will carry a forward note about any fees that are due to the previous sessions bad cancellation or miss, in accordance with your own published cancellation policy, and the patient will be asked to pay for that on their next attendance. Similarly, sessions that are attended, but where the patient has not actually paid reception before or after the meeting, will carry a forward note for reception to handle on their next attendance.

	As before, if the patient leaves during the referral fee period owing you fees, it is only the actual amount of fees taken (ie the number of sessions that s/he actually paid for) that is 'in the pot' for working out what referral fees you might owe.

	The comments above about you taking payment yourself (and not reception) now apply to this idea too. If you have been taking payments yourself, it is the number of sessions that the fee was due, either because the patient actually attended, or because of misses and bad cancellations that fall within the scope of your own cancellation policy - it is the number of these that counts as 'in the pot' for working out the referral fee due,.

	A small aside about off-site patients

	Off-site patients are now relatively few. If you are seeing patients offsite - this will apply to you. When the reception service starts, we will just be forgetting about the idea of sustaining any form of contract or relationship between The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy and the patient should the permanent or usual meeting place shift away from The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy's core offices. When you make an agreement to meet offsite, The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy will write to the patient saying that this is now a private arrangement, and that while we recommend the clinician and are confident etc., those meetings no longer have anything to do with The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy. All patients received offsite attract a referral fee of six times session fee, and it stops there. The referral fee is a one time event on the occasion that you decide to work with the patient offsite, and is payable irrespective of whether the patient comes along after that or not.

	Referral Fee payments made to The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy under both F1 and F2 will count as a credit against that chargeable event. The referral fee paid for off-site transitions counts if the patient is subsequently transferred back into The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy core premises.

	Receipt responsibility & bad debt

	Receipt responsibility is a 'one-off' decision or election that you make for that patient. It will NOT be possible to ask Reception Services to take receipt responsibility for the referral fee period, and then to revert receipt responsibility back to your own practice after that period.

	As you will have gathered, receipt responsibility is on a case-by-case basis if you have not authorised the wholesale transfer of your practice payments to reception services.

	In a case where you have taken receipt responsibility for that patient, The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy will never help you to pursue for bad debt - even if that means that we are practically charging you for referral fees that you never received from the patient.

	In a case where you have assigned receipt responsibility over to reception services, then The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy will actively pursue for bad debts on your behalf, without charging for that service. This will go as far as lodging a claim in the small claims court, should you want to pursue the matter that far. (We will always take your direction on how far to go!) The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy will pass over to you directly all monies received from bad debt collection.

	Assessment Patients

	About assessment patient DNA's. You will have noticed that now Phil is very active in supporting contacts for the assessment, and we are texting them on the day. This has improved attendance rates remarkably. But there is still an annoying crowd who book in, and are not responsible enough, nor courteous enough, to let us know that they have no intention of coming.

	Responsibility for contacting patients who fail to attend, and seeing what they want to do next will pass away from yourself, and onto administration and reception services. Reception will also be telephoning patients who have not arrived five minutes before their assessment time, to ask if they are lost etc., and otherwise doing what they can to 'get bums on seats'.

	With reception services, and the many new routes that have opened up for patient's to have contact with The London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, we will get a lot more 'shirty' with assessment patients who DNA on assessments, and we will always try to collect the fee due for that missed meeting.

	This documents last update has been electronically verified as posted on 09/02/2009 14:22:58