Firstly, I wanted to respond to you personally regarding the comments that you have made regarding your experience with us. I am sorry that there was no opportunity for me to discuss your feelings with you directly. The person you spoke to was a much valued member of our admin team, however of course any concerns or complaints would ideally be escalated to a senior member of our team.
We are of course extremely sorry that you experienced our service as rigid and money orientated. We feel quite strongly that we are neither of these things so I would like to have the opportunity to explain why we have to make some of the business decisions that you experienced. When booking an assessment we take a lot of time to explain the process over the phone, and follow up with an email containing all the details of the assessment along with our terms and conditions which clearly state our 24 hour cancellation policy. This policy is made clear upon booking and included in every correspondence email your daughter will have received from us as well as on our booking confirmation and reminder emails.
We will always do what we can to be flexible and accommodating with our clients and take into consideration the wider context with deep compassion and care, however we do also need to balance this with the realities of running a small business. Of course, in exceptional circumstances where late cancellation is unavoidable, we are more than happy to be flexible with our policy, however on this occasion, less than 30minutes notice of cancellation was given and unfortunately we cannot take having made a different booking as an exceptional circumstance. While of course we have a duty of care to be compassionate to our clients, we also have a duty of care to our clinicians and to our clinic to uphold our terms and conditions of service. When cancellations are made with notice we are then able to offer these appointments to others in need - an important aspect of keeping waiting lists to a minimum and maintaining the smooth operation of our busy clinic.
I really hope you may be able to understand why it is our policy to charge for unattended sessions and why unfortunately we feel strongly this is something we need to uphold unless unavoidable. We realise that a charge for a service that wasn’t provided is of course frustrating, and ideally we would have been given the opportunity to rearrange this assessment for you. I must also apologise that there was an overlap between you paying and us receiving payment. As soon as we have received the payment from Medical Billings, I would be more than happy to confirm this with you. I have reached out to them directly to understand why they've not yet communicated to us that payment has been received. This is absolutely a communication error, and one that I've addressed and will make sure doesn't happen again in future. Thank you so much for making me aware.
Thank you for taking the time to explain things from your perspective, I really am very sorry for any distress the cancellation policy has caused to either yourself or your daughter. I fully recognise you are all going through a lot at the moment and that added stress is of course not what you need at this time. I am also sorry that your daughter didn’t have the opportunity to experience the deep compassion and immense skill in our team but of course, I wish you all the best for your daughter's continued recovery journey.
