5 Steps To Setting Up Your Music Therapy Contract
If you are looking to set up a music therapy contract for your school, hospital, treatment center, practice, or company, here’s what to expect when setting up your program.
The process to starting a successful music therapy program looks similar for almost all businesses. It will follow 6 easy steps, and once we’ve set it all up you’ll likely wonder why you didn’t get started sooner!
#1 Discuss Your Company’s Needs
When we first meet with you to discuss music therapy we will look at your most pertinent areas of need and how we can best address the challenges that you or your clients face. This step involves phone calls or face to face meetings to discuss your unique needs. We may even have a music therapist visit your facility to observe the current program and help make informed suggestions of how music therapy can address your needs.
Some organizations such as hospice companies, schools, or early intervention programs have external evaluations that measure progress on specific criteria. Please let us know if this is the case for you. We can help determine the criteria music therapy will most easily address, and work to design a program that directly impacts those areas.
#2 Select Music Therapy Services That Meet Your Needs
Depending on the type of business you have and the clients you serve, you can choose to do group or individual music therapy services, or a combination of both.
Group Music Therapy
Because groups can reach more people simultaneously they give you more bang for your buck, but be aware that we do place limits on group size. Generally speaking, groups that start exceeding 8, 10, or 12 clients start to decline in therapeutic value and become more recreational in nature. It is very difficult to adequately address and work through complex clinical issues with large groups of clients.
We generally recommend the maximum group size to be 6 clients, but understand that this is not always possible for some organizations such as treatment centers, schools, or behavioral hospitals. In these cases we simply emphasize that cutting group size, if at all possible, will help clients make more meaningful progress. Ultimately, we will work together to determine what is best for your particular organization.
Individual Music Therapy
Individual services are a tremendous way to help your clients dig deep and get individualized attention and focus. This can be arranged in several ways, including:
- Regular 1:1 sessions each week with the same client
- Regular 1:1 time allotment where the MT selects a particular client who needs individualized attention before or after groups
- Request for 1:1 sessions on a case by case basis
If you are unsure whether group or individual services are right for you, please ask. We can help you evaluate your needs and give helpful suggestions based on your unique needs.
#3 Calculate Per Session Rate
Once you have decided what type of services are best for you, we will have the info we need to calculate the cost. As outlined in our article “What Does Contracted Music Therapy Cost?”, this will be determined by several factors, including session type, session length, number of sessions, scheduling, and commute/travel (applicable for contracts more than 20 miles away from our central office).
Once we have agreed upon a rate that works for you, we are ready to draft the music therapy contract.
#4 Draft & Sign the Contract
We have a contract template that we can utilize for our agreement, however we understand that some companies prefer to utilize their own existing templates. In this case we will simply review your company template and provide additions or suggest changes to suit the unique needs of our agreement.
Once the contract is prepared and adjusted to everyone’s satisfaction, we will sign and make sure everyone has a complete copy on hand.
#5 Begin Services
Once the contract is signed we are ready to start music therapy! Your hard work will begin to pay off as you see the tremendous impact music therapy has on your clients. They will love it, you will love it, and we’ll be off and running with a service that will impact your organization in exciting ways.
And most likely, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner!
If you want to know what music therapy would look like for your business, don’t hesitate to call! We’ve worked with a wide range of companies and are excited to help you.
So don’t wait. Call now to see how music therapy can make a big difference for YOUR business.
