Company History - Hands On Health - medical massage and wellness massage

In November 2003, Tammy Cole, Laura Landsiedel, and Elizabeth Laurino, launched Hands On Health massage therapy and wellness as a group practice. Formerly, Tammy Cole practiced in Cary as ‘Healthy Touch Therapy’, Laura Landsiedel’s DBA was ‘Hands On Health’ in Raleigh and Elizabeth Laurino’s was ‘Apex Treatment Center’. Because their individual vision and passion so equally mirrors each other’s, these three women feel that they are able to accomplish much more for their client’s well-being as well as for their professional community as a collaborative group practice.

As 'Hands On Health' we …

Maintain an environment where excellent, friendly, and consistent services happen; seek, welcome, and act upon constructive input from employees and clients; offer an accessible management policy and open therapist-management communication.

Support an active learning environment: Hands On Health requires its therapists to participate in its in-house medical massage training program, Integrative Neuromuscular Myofascial Technique, I-NMT; provide direct access to advanced education; encourage collaboration between seasoned practitioners and novices; encourage shadowing and tandem treatments; include a learning component in each monthly staff meeting.

Practice a cohesive teamwork model; our clients can depend on receiving the highest quality massage therapy possible regardless of the practitioner that they choose to visit at a particular time or day; when acting as a substitute for another therapist, our therapists develop a talent for balancing the ability to mirror each other’s skills while allowing for appropriate introductions to their own unique talents; our therapists share treatment notes, techniques, and all have access to treatment outcomes.

Nurture a healthy environment for our therapists and their clients; we aim to balance therapist health and environment needs with our client’s needs; while our therapists can depend on steady and consistent work schedules, pay, and reward-for-effort career advancement, our clients can depend on a well trained collaborative staff to meet their own treatment and busy scheduling needs.

Offer clients a choice: clients have the right of refusal – they can choose to fit into their primary therapist’s posted schedule or ask for a substitute therapist if another’s schedule better meets his or her needs; clients can view all our therapist’s schedules and qualifications on the website; we assure our clients that it is ‘OK’ to ask all our staff their opinion of another therapist’s skills.

Expect and model excellence and professionalism within the business community-at-large; actively participate as leaders who represent women in business; raise and model expectations and standards for massage therapists as wellness practitioners and as professionals; collaborate with complementary healing professions.

Contribute to the nurturing and financial needs of the community-at-large Community donations: Since January 2004, Hands On Health has donated auction sessions and financial contributions valued at over $24,000.

Maintain an engaged owner management model; expect that only massage therapists will own any future Hands On Health massage therapy and wellness practices.

Act to prevent therapist burnout: breaks between sessions and ½ day treatment schedules; monitor customer volume; support a therapist’s physical health; provide a stable business environment such that therapists can focus more on quality treatments and less on mundane business activities.

Seek passionate career minded therapists: monitor new therapists for their ability to maintain standards and share talents with an enthusiastic staff and, if necessary, remove therapists from the staff who we find do not fit well into our practitioner model.

Provide an environment where adjunctive careers can evolve for our employees such as teaching; management; IT, networking, marketing, future owner/manager opportunities; offer career development opportunities. Historically, massage therapy lacked career advancement infrastructure and therefore, the average career life was very low, ranging from 5-10 years. As a result, there is a sparse number of advanced leaders that are also highly skilled massage therapists. Hands On Health aims to make a difference in the career lives of massage therapists and, no less significantly, the future of the profession as a whole.