Terms and Conditions
Terms and Conditions
Rights
At SpeechEase Speech Therapy, we are committed to respecting your rights and providing the best possible service for you. Your rights include:
- You are safe
- You are treated with respect
- You can be part of your cultural community
- You can participate in your religion
- You can express your sexuality
- You can communicate in your family’s language
- You can make complaints
- You can make your own decisions
- You can say you want to go to another provider
You are the expert on you/your child. You can tell us what you want and when you want it. You can tell us what type of worker you want. You can tell us how you want things done. We will always do our best to work with you meet your needs and follow your instructions. We will talk with you if we aren’t able to follow your instructions or meet your needs so you can make an informed decision about the supports you are accessing.
We commit to treating you and your family members with respect. You and your family/friends agree to treat us and our employees with respect as well. We reserve the right to refuse admission or ask you to leave our premises or for our team members to leave the appointment location (e.g. your home / somewhere in the community) if you or anyone attending appointments with you behaves in a way that is likely to cause damage, nuisance, offence or injury. Abusive, aggressive or threatening behaviour including damage to property or belongings may be reported to the police.
Responsibilities
To ensure you get the best outcomes from therapy and achieve your goals, you can expect the following from your therapist:
- Plan for each session.
- Start and finish each session on time.
- Provide information and education on treatment solutions.
- Provide written homework at the end of each session.
- Liaise with other stakeholders as required and if consent is provided.
- Answer questions honestly and if the answer is unknown, try and find out through other sources.
- Conduct research regularly to ensure best practice is always used.
- Engage in regular professional development and clinical supervision to ensure best practice is always used.
- Adapt sessions and therapy plan to suit your needs as required.
- Complete written reports within four weeks of being asked.
To ensure you get the best outcomes from therapy and achieve your goals, your support team and you will need to:
- Arrive on time and prepared for each session.
- Ensure you have the support you need to actively participate during sessions
- Complete homework provided by your therapist at least five times a week or as otherwise recommended.
- Advise your therapist of any changes that may impact on your ability to achieve your goals (i.e. change of other professionals involved, health or family changes).
- Provide your therapist with information that is relevant to your abilities and progression as honestly as possible.
- Abide by the cancellation policy if you are unable to attend a session. You will make all reasonable attempts to reschedule the appointment to ensure you do not miss out on therapy.
- Provide your therapist with at least four weeks notice if a report is required.
- Provide your therapist or the SpeechEase Speech Therapy Director, Kate Thomson, with any feedback, compliments and complaints as required and in a timely fashion to ensure SpeechEase can provide a high-quality service that meets your needs.
- Take responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of yourself and any other persons in your care whilst SpeechEase Speech Therapy is providing services.
Privacy
SpeechEase Speech Therapy needs to collect information about you/a person under your care for the primary purpose of providing quality treatment. In order to fully assess, diagnose and treat you/a person under your care, we need to collect some personal information from you. If you do not provide relevant personal or health information, in part or in full, to SpeechEase Speech Therapy it may result in an incomplete assessment. This may impact on the diagnosis and the following therapy that is provided. This information will also be used for the administrative purposes of running the practice such as billing you or through an insurer or compensation agency. Information will be used within the practice for handover when another speech pathologist will be providing you/your child with ongoing assistance.
We store information like:
- Your name, address and phone number
- People who you are close to (e.g. your family and friends)
- Details about why and how we are helping you
This helps us to support you, and to check the quality of our services. We use your information so we can work with you to design supports that suit you.
We only share your information if you say ‘Yes’ or if there is a situation that makes us for your protection. We only share your information:
- With a trusted person
- When we need to so you can be safe
- With your permission to provide required information to NDIS or other government organisation.
When asked to share your information, you can say ‘No’ or opt out of sharing it.
We are responsible for keeping your information safe so only those you agree to can see it. Information at SpeechEase Speech Therapy is stored securely, and only SpeechEase Pty Ltd employees have access to it. SpeechEase Speech Therapy takes all reasonable steps to ensure that information collected about you/a person in your care is accurate, complete and up to date.
You have several rights with your information:
- The right to see a copy of the information we hold about you.
- The right to have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected by us.
- The right to object to any information you think is inaccurate.
If you want to see your information, please ask us.
Attendance and Cancellations
At SpeechEase Speech Therapy we are committed to providing a high-quality service to our clients. To do so, we have an Attendance and Cancellation Policy in place that focuses on achieving the best possible outcomes and progress towards our clients’ therapy goals and to better utilise available appointments for our clients.
Regular attendance is essential to progress; therefore, an 80% attendance rate across each term is required. Your attendance rate is not affected by public holidays, school holidays or cancellations initiated by your therapist.
We are unable to extend appointment times, we therefore ask that you arrive on time or early for your appointment to ensure you receive maximum benefit. If you are late to the appointment, full fees will still apply, and we will conclude the appointment as per the booking time.
All appointments at SpeechEase Speech Therapy are made in advance and therefore reserved to meet your specific requirements and preferences. Our Cancellation Policy reflects the time that your therapist sets aside for your appointment. With Speech Therapy services in high demand across Queensland, if we are given reasonable notice for any cancellations, we may be able to offer the appointment to another client in need of help.
We understand that from time to time, you may need to cancel or reschedule an appointment due to unforeseen circumstances, however, notice of cancellations need to be made at least 2 business days prior to the appointment, otherwise a 100% cancellation fee will apply.
For External Appointments, the therapist’s travel time is allocated as part of the whole booking, therefor late cancellations and no shows will also incur the full travel fee.
Our business hours are 7am to 6pm Monday to Thursday, and 7am to 12pm Friday. Cancellation notifications outside of these hours will be regarded as being received 7am the next business day.
To avoid the cancellation fee, we offer the following options (if available):
- Telehealth
- Reschedule your appointment to another day/time prior to your next booked appointment
As our Cancellation Policy is centred around effective utilisation of therapist time and provision of quality services to our clients, the cancellation fee will apply if less than 2 business days’ notice has been provided, irrespective of the provision of a medical certificate.
If we are unable to replace the time of your appointment with another client, and we are unable to reschedule your appointment to another day/time prior to your next appointment, and you are being charged the cancellation fee, we will always make sure that we are doing meaningful work for you during this time. This could include resource development, goal and progress review, research into other approaches/supports that could benefit your therapy plan, a phone call with other stakeholders involved in your care to make sure we’re all on the same page or a program for you to complete at home between now and your next session.
Non-attendance without notice of cancellation will result in 100% of the invoice being charged.
Please note, most funding sources do not cover late cancelled or non-attended appointments. This is especially true for Medicare and Private Health Funds. In this instance, you will be required to pay for the full session fee privately. If you receive NDIS funding, late cancelled or non-attended appointments can be claimed from your NDIS Plan.
If late cancellations or non-attended appointments become a regular occurrence, further discussions will be had about the suitability of therapy and your appointment time or frequency may be changed.
Infection and Disease Control
Please be mindful of spreading infections / diseases within our clinic or to our therapists. We work with children and adults who have complex medical needs and impaired immune systems who could have serious complications from a common cold. Please ensure you take all reasonable measures to stop the spread of infections and cancel appointments if required. SpeechEase Speech Therapy reserves the right to not start a session or end a session early if you or anyone who attends with you is visibly unwell. When this occurs, the cancellation policy may still apply.
Changing or Ending Services
You can request to change or end services with SpeechEase Speech Therapy at any time. This must be discussed with SpeechEase Speech Therapy to ensure all documentation, reporting and invoices are finalised. In the event that this is not discussed with us, we will attempt to contact you three (3) times over a three-month period before closing your file. Please note, once you discontinue services with us, you will be required to go through the new client process again if you wish to re-engage our services.
Payment Terms and Outstanding Invoices
SpeechEase requires payment on the day of the appointment or within seven (7) days of the invoice being sent out. Outstanding invoices need to be paid prior to further services being provided. If after a period of time the invoice is still outstanding, SpeechEase Speech Therapy reserves the right to engage their preferred Debt Recovery agency to assist with recovering the outstanding amount. Please note, 20% will be added to the invoice total by the debt recovery agency to cover their costs. If you are experiencing financial hardship and are unable to pay your invoice in full, please contact us so we can discuss alternative payment arrangements.
Compliments and Complaints
Have we done something you are really happy with? Is there something we can do better? Have we let you down? Here is how you can let us know:
- Come and Talk to Us
Come and chat to us about how we can improve our service. If we are not doing something well, we would love the chance to do better. You can contact us and let us know your feedback by any of the following methods:
- Speak to our Clinic Support Officer in person at the clinic.
- Call us on 1300 773 273 and select the number of the clinic you are contacting us about.
- Email info@speechease.net.au with the details of your feedback
- Send Us a Feedback Form
Your feedback helps us get better. You can use our feedback from to tell us what is going on. You don’t even have to put your name on it so you can remain anonymous. You can always find our Feedback Form on the Contact Us page of our website – www.speechease.net.au/contact
- Have we Fixed Things?
Let us know how we are doing. It can be hard to hear that we aren’t doing as well as we would like we really want to offer you the best service possible. If you have asked us to make a change, it would help us to know that we have fixed the problem. You can do this by using any of the above methods listed.
Are we still getting it wrong?
You have other options. If you wish to take your complaint further, you can do so by contacting the NDIS Commission on 1800 035 544 or online at www.ndiscommission.gov.au. Please let us know if you need some support to do this.
Reportable Incidents
There are some incidents that you may tell us about or that we see that must be reported to the relevant government authority. This is because you are important to us and we want to try and keep you safe. This also makes sure businesses providing supports are not doing anything wrong. We must follow these rules very carefully.
What is a reportable incident?
A reportable incident is:
- A death
- A serious injury
- A sexual assault or sexual grooming
- Abuse or neglect
- Unauthorised use of restricted practice
What we have to do
If we notice something, or you tell us about something that happened to you that is a Reportable Incident, we must tell a relevant government authority about it. This might be the Police, Department of Child Safety and/or the NDIS Commission. To do this, we may need to ask for more information to make sure we have all the details correct. We will document all of the information you give us.
What about your personal information?
There might be times where a serious Reportable Incident has happened where we will need to give your personal information to the relevant authority without your consent.
What do you need to do?
You don’t need to do anything. If a Reportable Incident happens you can tell us about it, and we will let you know what happens next. You can contact the relevant authority using the details below if you have any further questions:
- NDIS Commission – 1800 035 544
- Department of Child Safety – 1800 811 810