Nobody wants to buy physiotherapy, just like nobody wants to buy a drill. They want a hole in the wall.
When a runner comes to me, they don't want six appointments. They have something they don't want, they go to a place they don't know and do stuff they don't want to do. They just want to run again, and the appointments are merely the vehicle from ouch to huzzah.
Yet we sell physiotherapy one session at a time. £90, then another, then another, every session a fresh purchasing decision rather than part of a plan. Package care is the same problem bulk-bought, because a discount on appointments is still selling appointments. And nobody buys a new kitchen one cupboard at a time.
A while back I saw a lady with a ropey shoulder. Wrong diagnosis, understandably miffed off and just wanted it fixed. We talked past each other for half a session before I realised why. She was focused on the ticket price and I was focused on the destination.
The breakthrough came when we stopped discussing appointments and started discussing what her next two months would actually look like. The wins. The wobbles. The fact that she'd improve, plateau, then improve again, because recovery never follows the neat little graph we'd all like. Once she could see the journey, the cost made sense. It had context. And after that conversation she never asked about session numbers again.
We've built a model where patients buy appointments and clinicians sell outcomes. They are not the same product.
Patients simply don't remember the appointment count. They remember whether they got back to what mattered. Looking back, I've spent decades discussing the cost of treatment when I should have been discussing the journey and the value of the destination.