Prioritising Around Christmas

As we get ever closer to the world’s most famous birthday and the purse strings begin to tighten we all begin to prioritise what is important and what has to be let go. Disclaimer we are not financial advisors, far from it actually. But we are health care experts and want our clients to make the right decision for THEM.

We are all human and feel the effects Christmas has on our bank balances, for clinicians the inevitable conversations begin to crop up about reducing or stopping care to accommodate this. They started sooner than ever this year but there's little surprise there considering the 18 months we’ve all had.

Care is always determined by the client and we as clinicians simply advise the best option based on our findings and the most up to date clinical research available. However it is always disappointing to hear as a salutogenic health care clinician that a client is stopping care due to festive related financial issues.

Disappointing on different levels. The first from a personal perspective because part of our role as a clinician is to educate the client and influence them towards a better health state, ultimately to the point where they make better health decisions for themselves. Secondly, few things are inevitable but Christmas and its financial burden are always one, and I know £80 is a very different amount of money for different people. But if it were the difference between optimising my health or sky and netflix, i know which one i would be choosing. Maybe that's me being a bit biased, as I'm sure it is, but you get the point.

One client made it particularly clear to me when they were deciding on their membership plan moving forwards when they said “£80 a month is the cost of 2 family takeaways a month really isn't it?”. To which I replied “Yes, so the real question is which do you perceive as more valuable. There’s no right or wrong answer.” But the answer is solely based on your prioritises and what you value.

So when you're looking at the bank balance this christmas and calculate your average spend per family member and doing the maths, all i ask is when making your decisions on which of life's luxuries stay and which go prioritize them first. Even better is to make a pros and cons list for each item, then decide.