Brave and Well: Conversations helping mental health professionals build a sustainable, profitable, and values-aligned business

How to Plan for Maternity Leave in Private Practice

• Vanessa Newton • Season 1 • Episode 13

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I’m currently on my second maternity leave, and I’ve learned a lot while planning and taking two periods of extended time away from work.

So in this episode, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned about planning a maternity leave with you all!

Tune in as we explore—

  • Figuring out how much you want to save for maternity leave and when you plan to start saving
  • Deciding when you want to start sharing with your clients
  • Processing with your clients how they’re feeling about your leave
  • Creating a plan for transferring client care, terminating or taking a pause
  • Providing clients with a list of other therapists they can contact should they need someone to reach out to
  • Making clients inactive in your EHR system and document the plan of care while you’re away on leave
  • Setting your out of office message
  • Really giving yourself permission to take the break and the time you need

If you’re considering any kind of leave, I hope you’ll listen to this episode and share it with a friend.

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Brave and Well podcast. I'm your host, Vanessa Newton. I'm a group practice owner and social worker. I'm also a Latina, entrepreneur, mom, and recovering perfectionist. On this podcast, we teach mental health professionals how to build sustainable, profitable, and values aligned businesses. Here, you'll hear all about decolonizing the business side of private practice and supporting the entrepreneur and. Music. Therapist. We'll also invite fellow therapists and healers to share their stories. Our time together will be raw, honest, vulnerable, and held together by joy. If you like what you hear, subscribe to our newsletter at bravenwell.com slash newsletter dash sign up. Thank you for listening. Music. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Brave and Well podcast. I'm your host, Vanessa Newton. And today we're going to talk about how to plan for maternity leave in private practice. So by the time you hear this episode, I will be on maternity leave or at the start of it, I guess. So I wanted to kind of share a little bit about some steps you can take or things that you can think about when taking a maternity leave, questions clients might have for you when you tell them you're going on leave. And then a little bit about my personal story and kind of what I learned from my last maternity leave. So things to consider when you are or steps to take, I guess, when you are going to take a maternity leave or you know that you will be. I think one of the first steps is to figure out how much money you want to save in order to take a leave. And when you plan to start saving. So for me, I was already in kind of the phase. Of trying to have a baby. So my partner and I knew we wanted to have a baby. We were trying to have a baby. And so I kind of had started saving probably a year or two before I actually found out I was pregnant. And so, and we had to go through fertility treatments and things like that. And so my journey was a little bit different because I had to plan a lot. And my life was kind of centered around trying to have a kid. And so I knew exactly how much I needed to save and when I needed to start saving. So that happened pretty early on. And if you listened to my last episode on like money considerations and private practice and things to think about, you know that I was talking about, you know, considering that ramen noodle number, right? The base amount that you need to cover personal expenses and business expenses and to save that times three. And so at a minimum, that's kind of what I would recommend. But but depending on how much leave you're gonna take, that number can fluctuate. After that, you wanna decide, when are you gonna start sharing with clients that one, you're pregnant, and two, you're going on leave? I decided to wait until I started showing, and I was past my three-month mark of pregnancy. And everyone else's threshold of when they choose to share and how much they share about pregnancy is very different. For me, I had a hard time getting pregnant my first time. And so I was very cautious about when I shared, who I shared with and how much I shared. And so I just decided to wait a little bit even past my three month mark because I still had some fear around it, and felt like if I wasn't showing. Then there was no need to share. And at the time, this was pre COVID, right? So I was meeting with everyone in person, there was no telehealth that I was doing anyway, and all my clients were seeing all of me every day. And so, you know, there was, I couldn't really hide, hide it too long, but I hit it long enough, or I kept it to myself long enough, that made me feel comfortable. Now this pregnancy, I feel like I didn't tell my clients till I was six months maybe, I waited a really long time because they couldn't see me. I mean, we're all virtual, so. There was really no need to share right away. And I don't see a ton of clients right now anyway, so it wasn't a huge deal. Back then I was seeing 15, 20 clients a week, so it was a really big and I needed to kind of make a lot of plans. So decide when you wanna share with your clients and really make that process about you and what you're comfortable with, not what people tell you you should do. So let me just say that. After you share that information, there's an amount of processing you are probably gonna wanna do with clients and about your leave and about how they're feeling about your leave. I had several clients who had a really hard time with my news. And some of them were going through their own fertility struggles. Some of them I had been seeing for a really long time. Some of them we had a really strong relationship and attachment with each other. And so it was really hard. And there was a lot of processing that happened and a lot of tears and a lot of, you know. When you think about like the waves of grief, you know, that's really, I think what happened for several clients of writing that grief and really trying to be as honest, as they felt comfortable sharing with me how it felt for them. And so, you know, you wanna try to make a lot of space for processing that experience with your clients because you know them best. And within that, you want to create a plan for either transferring client care, terminating with clients, or taking a pause. So in my experience, I give clients options. I'll say, I'm going on leave. This is when my leave will start. I don't promise a return date. I did not promise a return date last time. I am providing a return date this time, but just because I'm taking longer than three months I'm actually taking a sabbatical. I'm not just taking a maternity leave. And I'll talk about that in a second. But you know, so last time I did not provide a return date. I just kind of said, I don't know when I'm coming back. I know I'm coming back. I made that clear because I knew that. I knew that I was gonna return to being a therapist. I just didn't know because it was my first baby and because I didn't know how I was gonna feel. After giving birth, I didn't know that if I returned, in what capacity I was returning at, how many clients I was gonna have the bandwidth to see. Et cetera, et cetera. There were a lot of unknowns And I wanted to give myself grace and give myself time to figure it out and to figure out how to be a mom and how to balance work and home and how, and if I wanted to be a full time stay at home mom, that I could give myself permission to decide that. And so I just, I didn't know a lot of things. And I think not giving clients a return date really gave me that permission to take the time. And so what I said was, you know, we could do a few things. We could transfer your care to another therapist that I would refer you to. We could terminate services completely and you could go with find a new therapist on your own. So when I say transferring care, I meant we could transfer your care to another therapist until I'm gone. And when I do come back, you could come back to me if you wanted to. Or we could terminate completely and you can move on with another therapist. Or you could take a break from therapy. If you feel like you're in a good space, I could give you names of other therapists that you could reach out to should you need someone while I'm gone. And several clients, took a break from therapy. A few of them saw another therapist while I was gone. And I don't think anyone terminated. I think maybe a couple did, but not too many. And so once I identified what is it that the client feels like they need and based on my experience of where they're at in their treatment, what would be my recommendation, we came up with the plan. And regardless of what clients decided, I provided every single client that I was seeing at the time a list of other therapists that they could contact should they need someone to reach out to, along with a couple of therapy listservs, because I didn't want anyone to go empty-handed, right? Regardless of what you decided about your care, you should provide clients with resources. That's so important. And then I documented all of it. I documented the plan of care while I'm away on leave in my EHR system and I made clients inactive in my EHR system. And so that's what we did. And then I set my out of office message to reflect when I would be gone, gave myself extra time, and just really gave myself permission to take the break in the time that I needed, to figure out this new chapter in my life. I think if you're a group practice owner, or this is gonna look a little bit different because you're not just thinking about how do I. Take care of my clients while I'm gone and make sure that they're cared for. But how am I going to make sure that my team is cared for? And how do I make sure that the business is still running without me while I'm gone? And so back then, when I took my first maternity leave, I was a group practice owner. At that point, we had a fairly large team, I guess, eight to 10 clinicians. And so what I did was I promoted one of my clinicians to become the clinical director of the practice. And he was the person that was responsible for making sure that. Clinicians had what they needed to do their job and made sure that our offices didn't burn down, basically that everything was running smoothly. Now, what's different then and what's different now is that then I was still managing the financial parts of the practice while I was on leave. I was still running payroll. I was still reconciling the books. I was still processing payments on the backend. I was still responding to emergency emails, but I was not in the day-to-day or kind of like in meetings or anything like that. I had my clinical director lead that. And at that time I had three admin positions. I had a marketing person, a client care coordinator to manage all the referrals that came in, and then our clinical director. So at least I felt like those basic functions that are needed to keep the practice moving, those were happening. This time I'm taking a true leave. And so when you think about questions clients might have for you when you do let them know about maternity leave, they might ask you, when are you coming back? And that's a big question, I think. A lot of people have clarity about that. I didn't. I do have clarity now, but really, I want to emphasize giving yourself grace to figure it out and not rushing yourself if you feel like, you know you might need more time, which is why providing clients with resources and information. For what they can use and access in your absence is so crucial and documenting that. They might ask you, will I hear from you when you come back? Or should I reach out? And what I always do is I say, when I'm ready to come back and I know when I'm coming back, you will hear from me. I will email you, I will let you know my start date, and I'll give you an option to decide. What you wanna do at that point in time, whether you wanna schedule a session with me, whether you feel like you're in a good place with your new therapist, or you feel like, you know, you still are not in need of services. So you will hear from me about a week or two before I decide to resume sessions. They might ask you, who can I reach out to while you're gone? So as a group practice owner, because I had someone who was taking the lead, I identified our clinical director and our client care coordinator as a main point of contact for anything practice related, if they had questions about their bill or anything logistically, but provided them with emergency services information and of course information for other therapists to reach out to. And so this time around, I feel like... It's different. I'm a group practice owner now of six years and I am in a different place in my life where I feel like I need a true break, not just to figure out how to be a mom of two, but also to decide how and when I wanna come back, to my group practice. I've decided that I'm gonna be taking a six month break. So I'll be taking a maternity leave and then we'll be taking more time for a sabbatical. So I'm gonna be taking about six months. And so my plan is that in August that I'll return in some capacity. I don't know what that's gonna look like yet, but I'm giving myself a good chunk of time and I'm truly going to be gone. And so I have promoted one of my, I promoted our director of equity to be the interim executive director of the practice. She will be acting in my place and she will be her and the leadership team will be managing the practice entirely without me in it. And so I will be completely absolutely removed. I will not be running payroll. I will be not reconciling accounts. I won't be looking at email. I will be completely offline and unreachable. And so that is new for me. And I'm ready and I feel excited about that and very nervous. Last time I took maternity leave, I had my baby December 2019. And then the world shut down in January, February after that because of COVID. And so my leave looked very differently than even what I thought it was going to look like. I was confined to my house. There was no office to go to. And so what I thought was going to be a three month maternity leave turned into a one month maternity leave. And because I was at home and we were in lockdown, I was working a lot. And so about after a month of getting acclimated to parenting, I started working again, because there was so much to figure out with COVID, right? And I knew that my clinical director was not prepared for this. Who was prepared for this? None of us were, not even myself, but I had to step in. I had to step in to figure out what we were gonna do with our services, figure out what was gonna happen with our office space, figure out how we were gonna support, the team. If you live in Texas, we had a huge snowstorm in February that left thousands of people without electricity and water for weeks. There was a lot happening those first few months of what was supposed to be my maternity leave, and I didn't get one. And so I pray and I hope that this time around will be different and that, you know, there will be no catastrophes that happen in the next couple of months, but you know, my maternity leave was not what I thought it would be. And at the same time, it was what it was. and... As a business owner, you have to be prepared for whatever comes your way and whatever happens. And the things that we don't plan for, the things that we do plan for, it's so unclear. So as much as you plan, we still don't know how things are going to pan out. And I think that that's a lesson in entrepreneurship that I have learned over and over again. And, you know, will continue to be open to, but it was a hard time. And I think I'm hopeful for this time to be a true break. And I also know that I have the tools and resources to pivot should I need to. So if you are on the brink of any kind of leave, maternity leave, sabbatical, transitioning out of your business, opening a business, you know, just sending you lots of love and care. And I hope that you have the support you need and the time you need to make the best decisions for you and your business and the people that you care for. So that's it for now. And until next time, stay brave. Music. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave and Well podcast. You can find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at www.bravenwell.com. Music. Listening platform. Then send it to a friend. For free resources, special announcements, and discount codes, subscribe to our newsletter at bravenwell.com forward slash newsletter dash sign up. Music.