Are your team’s needs being met in your practice? It’s a big question! For the past two years, veterinary teams have been overloaded in a major way, all while struggling with pre-existing staffing concerns. Identifying the needs of your team right now is crucial, and broadening the ways in which you offer support to your staff will help ensure they stay in the long term.
As a 24-hour ER facility, we have clients who call and come in worried, upset, nervous, pissed, and frantic. The emotions can run the gamut and sometimes bring a client to behave in an aggressive and confrontational manner. The goals when dealing with these clients are to defuse the situation, focus on the pet, and keep everyone safe. Here are a few tips we use when training new staff members about dealing with difficult clients:
A chicken, a rabbit, and a skunk walk into DoveLewis…
Veterinary technicians are essential in any veterinary clinic but they can come in many forms. Having grown up as a gamer, I can most easily define these forms as technician levels:
Any of us who took a basic economics class in college know the simple fact is that interviews for open DVM positions have suddenly become mini rose ceremonies ala The Bachelor – only with everyone wearing clothes and doing far less crying. This can also be a similar experience for other sought-after veterinary jobs.
I’ve been a veterinary technician for over 25 years. I call myself the, “longest continually employed veterinary technician” in the history of veterinary medicine. So far, I have not met anyone with more longevity in the profession. A lot has changed in the world of veterinary medicine over the last decade. Where do I start?
In this field, it’s not uncommon to feel the toll of burnout. I would feel mine come and go, having a hard day or entire week where I wasn’t coping as well as usual, making me wonder, is this burnout? But then over the next few days feeling the complete opposite, like I’m where I’m supposed to be. That’s the tricky thing about burnout and compassion fatigue, it doesn’t always present itself clearly and defined. It can ebb and flow, creating a feeling of constant displacement. When I started to feel like I would have more weeks of hardship than feelings of success, I decided to make a change.
DoveLewis is a 24/7 emergency animal hospital in Portland Oregon, and we face many of the same challenges that clinics across the country face. One challenge is creating a training program that not only supports technicians in their first two weeks but long after they have completed their onboarding process. Keeping this in mind led us to create the Technician Training Kits, with tiered levels that support technicians based on their experience in the field.
The Technician Training Kits were designed to improve the standardization of training and knowledge with a simple format and organized layout. Starting with Level One, which was created for the recent graduate or the newly hired credentialed technician, it allows technicians to demonstrate the foundational skills that are a necessary first step on one’s journey to leveling up. With a checklist of basic skills that a technician should be able to complete once joining your clinic (or within the first 6 months), Level One can give your team the starting point to create a formalized training system. Level One is available in both General Practice and Emergency & Critical Care versions, with some skills overlapping between the two.
