The Guided Patient System
Five named phases. Named contacts. Written plans. You will know where you are.
Most patients leave their first orthopaedic consultation with more questions than they arrived with. That is a design problem. The GPS was built to fix it.
The clinical promise
One surgeon, start to finish.
The surgeon you meet in clinic is the surgeon who operates on you — and the surgeon who reviews you afterwards.
There is no rotating registrar making the call. There is no proxy at the operating table on the day. The same hands that examine your shoulder, plan your operation, and explain the decision are the hands at the table when it matters most.
This is not how most private orthopaedic clinics work. It is how the GPS was designed to work.
The five phases of the Guided Patient System
Each phase has a defined owner, a defined output, and a defined timeline.
The GPS is not a brochure of values. It is a structured patient pathway with named roles, named contacts, written plans, and time-specific deliverables. The phases are sequential. The deliverable at the end of each phase is the entry condition for the next.
Orientation.
From the moment your referral arrives, your care coordinator has a named role. You will be contacted by a person who has read what you sent — not an automated reply. The Orientation phase exists to give you clarity before you make any decision.
Preparation.
Before your appointment, the imaging is in hand and the appointment is built around what you need the shoulder to do. The nurse practitioner reviews your history and examines the joint; Dr Coory then personally reviews you in the same visit. The first question is not about the MRI — it is about your life.
Intervention.
If surgery is the right answer, Dr Coory performs it personally. No junior delegate, no registrar substitution. The CT plan, the implant choice, and the soft-tissue balance are matched to the life the shoulder is supposed to serve — the surgical plan that serves a surfer is not identical to the one that serves a plasterer.
Recovery.
Rehabilitation is the operation that lasts. Your treating physiotherapist receives a procedure-specific written protocol on the day of surgery. Dr Coory will see you at protocol-defined milestones; your physiotherapist will see you weekly. Between visits, your care coordinator is the named contact.
Lifestyle Design.
The measure of recovery is not the post-op X-ray. It is what you can do on a Monday morning. The grandmother picks up the six-month-old without thinking. The plasterer reaches the end of a three-hour ceiling without taking a tablet at lunch. The surfer paddles out at six. Phase 5 is the philosophy that governs everything before it.
The GPS promise.
A named contact at every phase. Written plans before every milestone. Honest about the difficulty of recovery, specific about the timeline, calm about the path. The system has already thought about your situation before you walked in.
Begin Your JourneyInside Phase 02 — Preparation
The combined clinic. Subspecialty-trained nurse practitioners.
Inside the Preparation phase, the practice operates a combined-clinic model: a subspecialty-trained nurse practitioner reviews your history, examines the relevant joint, and prepares your imaging so that your time with Dr Coory is focused and unhurried. Every patient is then personally seen by Dr Coory in the same visit.
The triage role
Subspecialty depth, not generalist intake.
Our nurse practitioners are trained specifically in shoulder and upper-limb assessment. They are not general staff. The triage they perform is clinical — not administrative — and it is what allows urgent cases to be seen quickly while the routine cases are seen well.
The surgeon review
Every patient personally seen by Dr Coory.
No exceptions. Dr Coory personally examines every new patient and personally reviews every set of imaging. The diagnosis and the plan are made by him in the same appointment, with you in the room. The triage prepares the visit. The surgeon is the visit.
Speed when it matters
Urgent shoulder injuries seen within a week.
Acute traumatic dislocations, displaced distal radius fractures, suspected traumatic cuff tears in younger patients — the nurse-practitioner triage means these cases can be brought forward without compromising the surgeon-led decision.
A private-fee practice, deliberately
The GPS is what makes the fee structure honest.
A private-fee practice exists for one reason: to make the GPS model above operational. Named contacts at every phase, unhurried consultations, direct surgeon-to-physiotherapist communication, same-surgeon continuity, written plans — these are only achievable when the clinic is not run at volume. The fee structure reflects the model. Your care coordinator provides written fee estimates before any consultation or operation.