Terms of Service

Important Information for Clients.

Booking & Cancellation Policy

We provide our services to you subject to this Agreement. As always with a binding contract, you should read through it carefully before making a booking. We may change the terms and conditions of this Agreement, but the latest version will always appear on our website at About You Speech Pathology | Speech Pathology Central Coast. If you continue to use our services after changes have been made to this Agreement, you will be considered to have accepted the changes to the Agreement between us.

At About You Speech Pathology ABN 35 674 512 271 we:

Spend several hours preparing for our clients
Prepare for each of our client appointments properly; and
limit the number of clients we see each day to ensure we are providing a quality service to each client.

If you book an appointment with us and don’t turn up – or if you contact us to cancel an appointment with less than two working days’ notice – three things happen:

We lose the time we have spent preparing for your appointment – time we could have spent helping another client or helping you in another way.

We may not have enough time to reschedule another client for your appointment time, which reduces the total number of clients we can help that day. This is not fair for people on our waiting list.

We lose income, which makes it more difficult for us to invest adequately in our workers and resources to provide you and other clients with quality service. In some cases, this can mean that our staff don’t get paid as much for their work as they would have had the appointment happened.

Our services and support are most effective when we trust and value each other’s work. We know that unexpected things happen – e.g., cars break down, people get sick, important travel commitments crop up at short notice. But “no shows” and late cancellations (also known as “failures to attend” or “did not attend” (“FTAs” and “DNAs”) – particularly if they happen more than once – can interfere with our trust in each other and, over time, can affect a client’s overall quality of care. We take pride in our work and don’t want this to happen.

Agreement

As noted in our Service Agreement, booking a face-to-face or telehealth service, support, assessment, therapy session, intervention session, or other appointment with us (collectively, an “Appointment“) creates a legally binding contract – the “Agreement” – between you and us. The parties to this Agreement are:

(1) the person who makes the booking, referred to in this Agreement as “you”; and

(2) us.

By making the booking on behalf of yourself or another adult or a child under your care, you confirm that you are authorised to agree to these terms and conditions.

We provide our services and support to you subject to this Agreement. As always with a binding contract, you should read through it carefully before making a booking for an Appointment. If we make changes to the agreement, you will be notified in writing. If you continue to use our services after changes have been made to this Agreement, you will be considered to have accepted the changes to the Agreement between us.

As an NDIS provider, we are subject to the NDIS Code of Conduct (2019) (the NDIS Code). Amongst other things, this means we must:

respect and protect the privacy of everyone that receives supports and services from us and our workers;
manage health information about any people we support and our workers in accordance with privacy laws related to the management of health information; and • have this Policy and provide you with this Notice about our privacy policy and procedures to help ensure we (and our workers) understand our obligations.

Appointment Bookings

Usually, we will email you your initial Appointment confirmation (to the email address you provided us when you first contacted us) within 48 hours of booking. If you have not received your appointment confirmation within 48 hours of booking, please check your spam or junk email folder or filter and, if it’s not there, please contact us. It is your responsibility to ensure that your email is set up to allow you to receive your email confirmation, and we cannot accept any liability for any consequences of you not doing so.

The fees and other charges for the initial Appointment and each subsequent Appointment for the calendar year is set out in our initial Appointment confirmation email and must be paid in full, and in the currency stated, by cash, debit and/or credit card on or before the date of the relevant Appointment. For NDIS self-managed and plan managed bookings invoices will be sent out within one week of the appointment and are to be paid within 7 days of receiving the invoice.

Cancellations, changes to bookings and failures to attend appointments

Consistent with common practice and the NDIS Pricing Guide for this year, we will accept cancellations up to two business days before an Appointment. A business day for us includes Monday to Friday you must notify us by email or by telephone or by short message service (“SMS”) text, and we must receive your email, telephone call or SMS text. Our current contact details are set out ph. 0431348807 email aboutyouspeech@gmail.com

What happens if you fail to attend or cancel an Appointment without enough notice Attendance and expected conduct?

Please ensure you arrive on time for each Appointment. For the benefit of other clients, we will not admit you to your Appointment any later than 15 minutes after the scheduled Appointment time. You will remain liable for the Appointment fee and we will not issue any refund in this event.

In connection with providing our services to you and/or a person under your care and/or in accordance with our child protection and safety policies, we may sometimes film, audio-record, or otherwise record our Appointments, in part or in full. Please note that your consent (on behalf of yourself and your child) to being filmed or recorded in connection with our services is a condition of this Agreement. The recordings will form part of your health records (or the records of someone else under your care, as the case may be) and will be held subject to the terms of our Privacy Policy.

We reserve the right to refuse admission to you and/or any person under your care or ask you and/or any person under your care to leave our premises if we think you and/or they are behaving in a disruptive way or in a way that violates our lease, or in a way that is likely to cause damage, nuisance, offence or injury to any person. You will remain liable for the Appointment fee and we will not issue any refund in this event.

By entering into this Agreement, you agree to ensure that you and all people under your care attending an Appointment under a booking made by you comply with all health and safety and other rules and regulations applicable to our premises. You also agree not to bring onto our premises any illegal or hazardous items or to allow such items to be brought onto our premises by a person under your care. You also agree to comply with any reasonable request by a worker at our premises (for example, and without limitation, requests relating to infection control or the health and safety of our staff).

Assessments are expensive to plan and hard to schedule. Before an assessment, we spend significant time: (a) reviewing intake information, questionnaires and other information you send to us;(b) planning a tailored assessment battery to address your key concerns; and (c) preparing expensive assessment forms required to conduct the assessment. If you book an assessment with us and don’t turn up – or if you contact us to cancel a booked assessment with fewer than seven days’ prior notice – we lose several hours of time, money in lost revenue, incur expenses on assessment forms, and lose the opportunity to book in another client from our waitlist. To mitigate this risk, we require a deposit of 50% of the assessment fee at the time of booking the assessment.

Important

(a) If you fail to attend, cancel or seek to reschedule an assessment Appointment with fewer than seven days’ notice:

(i) you will forfeit the Assessment Deposit;

(ii) you will be liable to pay us the remaining fee for the Assessment Appointment except, at our sole discretion, in exceptional circumstances outside your control; and

(iii) the assessment Appointment will not be rescheduled until we have been paid for the assessment Appointment that did not take place because of your failure to attend, late cancellation, or attempt to reschedule.

(b) If you fail to attend, cancel or seek to reschedule an Appointment (other than an assessment Appointment) with fewer than two working days’ notice:

(i) you will be liable to pay us the fee; and

(ii) if you have already paid us part or all of the fee, you will not receive a refund, for such Appointment except, at our sole discretion, in exceptional circumstances.

(i) an assessment Appointment; or

(ii) two or more Appointments,

We reserve the right to discharge you and/or any person under your care from our service without notice.

(d) Payment for Appointments is due on the Appointment date. If you fail to pay one or more of our invoices, we reserve the right to discharge you and/or any person under your care from our service without notice, and reserve all rights to pursue the debt.

If we need to cancel an Appointment for any reason, we may do so at any time before the Appointment is scheduled to begin. We do not expect this to happen except in exceptional circumstances, and we’ll refund any fees you’ve paid us for the Appointment, or offer you a choice of alternative dates for the Appointment, but we won’t be liable to compensate you for any other expenses you’ve incurred in connection with the Appointment. We will try to notify you of cancellations, but we can’t guarantee this, especially when an Appointment is cancelled at short notice (e.g. if your treating speech pathologist is ill).

Attendance and conduct

In connection with providing our services to you and/or a child under your care and/or in accordance with our child protection policies, we may sometimes film, audio-record, or otherwise record our Appointments, in part or in full. Please note that your consent (on behalf of yourself and your child) to being filmed or recorded in connection with our services and/or for child protection purposes is a condition of this Agreement. The recordings will form part of you or your child’s health records and will be held subject to the terms of our Privacy Policy.

By entering into this Agreement, we reserve the right to refuse admission to you and/or any child under your care or ask you and/or any child under your care to leave our premises if we think you and/or they are behaving in a disruptive way or in a way that violates our lease, in a way that is likely to cause damage, nuisance, offence or injury. You will remain liable for the Appointment fee and we will not issue any refund in this event.

Therapy Blocks Breaks and Discharge

After an assessment or a review, we may recommend a therapy block composed of a fixed number of therapy sessions, spaced over a set number of weeks, within a defined period (the “Therapy Block”), followed by a therapy break and, potentially, further therapy or a discharge from our service (at our sole discretion). Our recommendations will usually be set out in writing, in an assessment report or in an email. We do this for four main reasons:

Spacing effects: Short bursts of treatment spread over weeks may help clients to learn new skills better than intensive treatments taught over consecutive days (e.g., Riches et al., 2005; and Smith-Locke et al., 2013).
Learning plateaus may exist for speech-language and literacy interventions (e.g., Ambridge et al., 2006; Riches et al., 2005); and there are points of ‘diminishing returns’, where little additional benefit is derived from too much therapy without a break (e.g., McGinty et al., 2011).
Opportunity costs: time spent in speech therapy is time that cannot be used to practice communication skills in real world social situations. Increasing participation in other activities may be required to transfer therapy gains to the real world.
Fairness: The current shortage of speech pathology services in Australia means that many clinics, including ours, have long waiting lists. It’s unfair to give one client very lengthy blocks of therapy while others wait for a service they need. Regular therapy breaks across our caseload enable us to reduce average waiting times for everyone (including you).

By entering into this Agreement, you acknowledge our recommendations for a Therapy Block and accept that access to services after the Therapy Block will depend on a number of factors and considerations, including attendance records during the Therapy Block (including any failures to attend and late cancellations), the amount of regular home practice conducted throughout the therapy block, the availability of our staff, competing priorities (including our waitlist at the time) and ethical, legal, operational, logistical, financial, and other factors that may affect our capacity to offer further therapy after the Therapy Block ends. If you want further Appointments after a Therapy Block ends, we will discuss your request and, potentially, waitlist you for a review and, if warranted, a further block of therapy. For the avoidance of doubt, however, we do not guarantee that we will be in a position to offer any therapy or other services after any initial Therapy Block ends.

Limitations of liability

Nothing in this Agreement excludes or limits our liability where such limitation of liability is not permitted by applicable law. Subject to the first sentence of this paragraph, the following two paragraphs apply:

Our total aggregate liability in contract, tort (including negligence or breach of statutory duty), misrepresentation, restitution or otherwise arising in connection with this Agreement, shall be limited to the total amount received by us from you in connection with the Appointment or Appointments(s) giving rise to such liability.

You and/or any person under your care attend and participate in Appointments at your own risk. We accept no responsibility for any of the following:

(a) in respect of any person prevented from entering our premises, or asked to leave due to their conduct;

(b) costs or expenses whatsoever or howsoever arising out of or in connection with any Appointment;

(d) personal injury, except as set out above; and

(e) loss of data, profit, revenue, use, business, anticipated savings, goodwill, reputation or opportunity, financial or economic loss or any indirect or consequential loss or damage.

Privacy: In processing your personal data, we comply with all applicable Privacy legislation. Please see our Privacy Policy for details.

Intellectual Property: All materials provided to you by us or by our workers or associates, and any intellectual property belonging to or associated with us and/or our services and supports, including any website, trade mark or trade name, logo, software, text and graphics, are the sole property of us and you agree that you will not infringe any such rights in any way. You can make a copy of materials provided for your own personal use, but no other use of them is authorised.

Force Majeure: We will not be liable for any breach of this Agreement which is a result of circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including but not limited to pandemic or infectious diseases, strike, lock-out, labour dispute, acts of God, acts of terrorism, war, riot, civil commotion, malicious damage, compliance with a law or governmental order, rule, regulation or direction, accident, breakdown of plant or machinery, insolvency or bankruptcy of either party or any third party, fire, flood, snow and storm, exceptional weather conditions, difficulty or increased cost in obtaining workers, goods or transport and other circumstances affecting the supply of goods or services.

Rights of Third Parties: A person who is not a party to this Agreement has no rights to rely upon or enforce any term of this Agreement.

Assignment: You may not transfer, assign or otherwise dispose of your interest in this Agreement without our prior written consent.

Severability: If any provision in this Agreement is deemed to be illegal, unenforceable or invalid for any reason, it shall be deemed to have been struck out and the remaining No waiver: Any failure by us to enforce any provision of this Agreement at any time (including, without limitation, in respect of any Appointment fee) shall not be construed as a waiver of such provision and shall not affect our right to enforce such provision.

Variation: This Agreement may only be varied by express written agreement of the parties.

Jurisdiction: The construction, validity and performance of this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of New South Wales and both parties agree to submit to the non exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New South Wales.