Write down the four jobs first
Strategy decides what to say and to whom. Writing turns clinical thinking into language a patient understands, in two languages. Filming and editing turn that into assets. Distribution and reporting close the loop. These are genuinely different skills, and someone excellent at one is usually average at the others.
Score any candidate against all four honestly. If they cover two, you have solved half the problem — decide in advance who covers the other half before you sign the offer, or it defaults to you.
Selling products or courses alongside the clinic?
Shopify is the quickest way to put a store behind your name — try it free.
The real cost is not the salary
Add the equipment, the software subscriptions, the recruitment time, the management time — someone has to brief, review and approve — and the cost of the months where output is poor while they learn your specialty. Then add the risk: a single hire who leaves takes the whole capability with them and you restart from zero.
Compare that total against a retainer covering the same four jobs, and against the hybrid most mid-size clinics land on: one in-house coordinator handling day-to-day publishing and inbox, with production and strategy bought in.
If you do hire, set it up to succeed
Give them access to you. The single biggest reason in-house content underperforms in clinics is that the doctor is never available to film, so the new hire fills the calendar with graphics nobody asked for. Book a recurring filming slot in the clinic diary on day one and treat it as unmovable.
Then measure them on the right things: enquiries and attended appointments by source, not on posts published or followers gained. Otherwise you will get exactly what you measured — a busy grid and an empty calendar.