Road-based nurses can ease equine ‘capacity problem’

Greater use of ambulatory nursing services can help to tackle capacity challenges in equine care, an RVN and practice leader has argued.

Cassie Woods urged BEVA Congress delegates to think more about the role of nurses in their clinics as she set out a business case for them in frontline equine practice.

She said: “We all know equine practice has a capacity problem and the demand has changed faster than we can recruit.

“This is a model that cannot rely on stretching vets further.”

Pick up work

Mrs Woods, a partner at the Lower House Equine Clinic in Shropshire, argued modern practices were already using nurses to pick up work in areas such as wound care, blood sampling, medication administration, postoperative treatment and biosecurity support.

She stressed the system was not creating new work, but was meant to ensure functions were “appropriately delegated”, while also providing additional capacity for vets to respond to emergencies or work on more complex cases.

In one example, she estimated that 15 minutes spent taking a blood sample could generate up to four times the amount of unproductive travel time for a vet.

Nurse-led service

Mrs Woods, who is also a member of BEVA’s equine nurse and trust committees, urged delegates thinking of launching a nurse-led service to audit their diaries and find repeatable demand that could be delegated before taking the plunge.

But she warned that practices would also need to ensure the whole team supported it to ensure vets were only being allocated work that they alone can do.

Mrs Woods said: “By doing all this we’re not just improving the clinic. We’re increasing job satisfaction for nurses.

“Employing EVNs is a cost but undercutting them is a much bigger cost. If you have nurses in your team, go back and think about what they’re doing and what you can do to help them improve capacity, demand and overall turnover of the business.”