Financial Times

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Business booming for physiotherapist

Case Study by Jonathan MoulesNatasha Price, managing director of Central Health on London’s Chancery Lane, has been a qualified physiotherapist for 20 years but she has never seen business so brisk.Several of her regular clients are now unable to get time away from their desks to visit her but their disappearance is more than compensated for by new bookings coming in off the street.“At the end of the day, physiotherapy and mental health treatments are fairly recession proof,” she says. “But we seem to have got more people turning up now because they are so stressed at work.”Central Health has 40 physiotherapists but does not employ people who have only just qualified.Finding qualified staff to fill vacancies is not a problem, according to Ms Price, because so many experienced physios are leaving the National Health Service in search of greater rewards in the private sector.Although Central Health does have some wealthy individual clients, 90 per cent of customers pay for their treatments using their employer’s private health insurance.“The worry for us is if they then lose their jobs,” Ms Price says.FINANCIAL TIMES 8TH NOVEMBER 2008