Have you recently sent your children back to school for another year?
Even as adults, we feel the pull of the new school year. We remember what it’s like to walk into a new homeroom, seeing who else is in your class, hoping that you would have a successful year. It was exciting, but also pretty stressful.
Kids have so much going on in their heads that we just don’t know about, with so many unspoken struggles. That’s one of the reasons why therapy for minors is so essential. Although family therapy can also be an excellent idea, sometimes kids feel that they can only talk about things when their parents aren’t there. As a mental health professional, you have to juggle multiple kinds of therapy (personal, family, with minors) with many different clients and it can get a bit confusing. That’s why Owl Practice launched our Circle of Care system, to make sure that managing families with minors is as easy as linking two contacts in our system together. That’s it!
Minor Client Profiles
Keeping detailed and efficient records is a vital part of being a mental health worker. It’s one of the main reasons why so many people decide to go with Owl Practice. We have an incredibly robust system that is ideally suited to handle families with minors.
When you’re setting up a minor’s client profile, you can not only include their name and personal info, but you’ll also be able to add everyone else who is important to their mental health, such as their parents, teachers, doctors, other mental health professionals, social workers, and more. That way, all of that information will be right there at your fingertips when you need it.
Circle of Care
If you’re also seeing a parent or a sibling of a minor, you can link their profiles together, allowing you to define their exact relationship. This not only works for kids and parents, but it also works for couples in counselling. This makes setting up group sessions between family members a snap!
All you have to do to set up linked profiles is select “Add Linked Client” in a client profile, search for the related profile, and click. You’ll also be able to set up a family member in the Circle of Care as the primary contact for emergencies or billing purposes. This “Bill-To” feature is incredibly useful if you’re working with a minor, as the invoice and receipt will be in the client’s name, but the parents’ information will be used for billing and insurance claims. It just simplifies the entire billing process.
Scheduling Appointments
Are teenagers reliable? Well, that depends on the kid, but for the most part, they don’t have an eye on the ball the same way their parents do. If you have a group session set up for Friday, the teen might not remember and head off on their own. That’s one of the reasons why our group appointment reminders can be so useful. Everyone gets a reminder delivered straight to their personal email, so there will be no excuse if they don’t show up.
Another thing that teens and kids aren’t great at is “homework.” If you send them necessary onboarding forms that they need to fill out, who knows when you might get them. To make sure that the forms get completed, you can also send the same forms to multiple parents. And using our tools, you can track their progress as they complete them!
Other Circle of Care Features
Often, you need to store more than just notes in a client’s file. You might be doing art therapy with them and need to save scans of their work, or there could be other therapy documents that you want to file away. That’s no problem at all; you can just upload them to Owl Practice and file them in your minor’s client profile. The documents will be there whenever you need them!
Treating minors can be tricky, with many landmines that could be set off with the lightest footfall. That’s why you want to ensure that your practice management system will do everything that you need it to, allowing you to keep all important information about the minor safe and sound in our PIPEDA-protected system.
If you’d like to check out some of our services, please sign up for a free demo! If you have any questions or comments about our services, we invite you to contact us at support@owlpractice.ca.
As always,
Practice Wisely
