Private ear wax removal is one of the few healthcare services where the booking process is part of the clinical work. A haircut booking needs a name and a time. A microsuction appointment needs to establish, before the patient gets in the car, whether microsuction is safe and appropriate for them at all.
That is why “just put a calendar on the website” tends to disappoint. It removes the phone tag and adds a new problem: people booking who should not have booked, found out at the door, in a slot nobody can now fill.
Here is how to set the whole thing up properly. The decisions first, the software second.
Decide these five things before you look at any software
Every booking tool will ask you for these in some form. Working them out on paper first turns setup from an afternoon of fiddling into about twenty minutes of typing.
| Decision | What you’re actually settling |
|---|---|
| Your services | Not just “ear wax removal”. One ear or both? Is a consultation-only appointment possible if the ear turns out to be clear? Is a follow-up different from a first visit? Each of those is a separate bookable service, and each can ask its own screening questions. |
| Where you work | A rented clinic room two days a week, a room at home, a mobile round. Each place has its own opening hours and its own travel constraints. Patients should be choosing a place and a time, not just a time. |
| How much of your day to show | Offering every free time fills your week scattered. Offering only the first few free times each day fills you back to back and leaves whole afternoons clear. Both are valid; pick deliberately. |
| What you must know before they travel | Your screening questions. The next section is entirely about this. |
| What happens when plans change | Your cancellation window, and whether patients can reschedule themselves. Decide it now, write it in one sentence, and put it where they book. |
The consent form is the actual product
If you take one thing from this article: your booking page’s job is to run your screening before the appointment is reserved, not to email you a name.
Practitioners screening for microsuction typically ask about recent or historical perforation, previous ear surgery, current infection, discharge, pain, dizziness, and whether the patient has only one hearing ear, alongside practical questions like how long they have been using oil, whether they wear a hearing aid, and how previous removals went.
Treat that as a prompt list, not a clinical protocol. The authoritative version of your screening is the one that matches your own scope of practice, your professional body’s current guidance, and what your indemnity insurer expects you to have documented. Write yours down, then make your consent form ask exactly those questions.
A few things that make a consent form work in practice:
- Ask in plain English. “Have you ever had a burst or perforated eardrum?” gets a truer answer than “history of tympanic membrane perforation”.
- Yes/no wherever you can. Free-text answers are slower for the patient and harder for you to scan on the morning of a clinic.
- One follow-up box, not five. “Anything else about your ears we should know?” catches most of what a fixed list misses.
- Put your consent wording in the form itself, not in a separate email afterwards. The moment they book is the moment they will actually read it.
The payoff is concrete. Every answer that stops an unsuitable booking is a slot you keep and a wasted journey the patient does not make, and you walk into every appointment already knowing what you are dealing with.
Confirmations and reminders are not extras
No-shows are the quiet tax on a solo practice. There is no colleague to absorb the gap: an empty forty minutes is simply income that does not happen.
Whatever you set up needs to send, automatically:
- a confirmation the moment the booking is made, with the address and the date;
- a reminder before the appointment, far enough ahead that the patient can still move it if they need to;
- a message to you when something is booked or cancelled, so you are never finding out on the day.
One recovered appointment a month generally covers the cost of the software that sent the reminder. That is the whole business case, and it does not need any optimism to work.
Getting your booking link in front of patients
A booking page nobody can find changes nothing. Five places worth doing in your first week, roughly in order of return:
- Your Google Business Profile. For local search this is the highest-value spot you own, and it has a booking link field. Most people searching “ear wax removal near me” never reach your website at all.
- A button on your website, in the header and at the foot of the page. “Book online” beats “Contact us”.
- Your voicemail and your out-of-hours reply. “You can book directly at…” converts the calls you cannot answer, which are the ones you are currently losing.
- A QR code on your leaflets and in the waiting area. Same link, no typing, useful for rebooking someone standing in front of you.
- Your email signature and social bios. Free, permanent, takes a minute.
Note what is not on that list: a directory. Listing on a marketplace means paying a fee per booking for patients who were often already yours, and it puts somebody else between you and them. Your own link keeps the relationship.
A one-evening setup checklist
Worked through in order, most solo practitioners get from nothing to taking real bookings in a single sitting.
- Write down your services, and the appointment length that fits the work you do most.
- Write down each location and its opening hours.
- Decide whether you are offering every free time, or only the first few each day.
- Write your screening questions, starting from your professional body’s guidance.
- Write your consent wording in plain English.
- Write your cancellation policy in one sentence.
- Set up confirmations, a patient reminder, and an alert to yourself.
- Put the link on your Google Business Profile, your site, and your voicemail.
- Book yourself in as a test patient. Do it on your phone. Read every email it sends.
That last step is the one people skip, and it is the one that catches the mistakes: a question that reads oddly, an address with a typo, an appointment length five minutes short of what the work actually takes.
Where we come in
Praxbook is built for exactly this: one practitioner, their own booking link, and a consent form the patient completes before the timeslot is reserved. Multiple locations with their own hours, automatic confirmations and reminders, patients rescheduling and cancelling themselves, and a full audit trail of every change, with your data held in the UK.
There is no app to install, and it works on an old phone on a bad connection, which matters more than it sounds like it should: that describes a real share of your patients.
It is free for 30 days with no card, and early access pricing is limited to the first 50 practitioners and locked for life.