Use whole team call to avoid pet overtreatment

Two leading clinicians have called on vet practices to make use of their entire team to help avoid overtreating patients.

Speaking on the Vet Times Podcast, BVA senior vice-president Elizabeth Mullineaux and Pet Lighthouse director Caroline Allen argued whole-team approaches can improve client relationships and enable practices to prioritise animal welfare.

Dr Mullineaux pointed to a “perfect storm” of advances in veterinary medicine, corporatisation and increasing client expectations driving overtreatment, noting: “The veterinary world has moved on so quickly, and that’s not going to stop. It’s going to keep moving quickly, and we need to find a way of keeping up with it.”

‘Wrong direction’

She highlighted issues with managing client diaries and ensuring continuity of care, adding: “One thing I think we’ve lost during our veterinary lifetimes is our relationships with our clients.

“There’s a perfect storm of what’s made this worse and perhaps pushed us a bit in the wrong direction. We don’t know the people we’re dealing with as well as we used to.”

Dr Allen called for better communication around repeat appointments to ensure continuity and suggested practices can better match clients with vets whose approach fits their needs.

Front-of-house role

The ex-RSPCA chief vet said: “Contextualised care can’t possibly be done in a 15-minute consultation.

“It’s about how do we make this something for the whole practice team? Front-of-house have a really important role to play, the role of the veterinary nurse.

“It’s about having that relationship, having that understanding, because there is a lot of information that needs to be filtered through.”

She added: “Well-trained front-of-house staff are worth their weight in gold, and I think that’s often not recognised.”

Dr Mullineaux agreed, arguing all staff “really should be able to feed back how clients are feeling” via practice management notes.

Learn expectations

She suggested more can be done to learn about clients’ expectations, pet care approaches and how they are coping with managing chronic conditions, adding practices “need to rethink the way we use our time and our teams”.

Dr Allen argued vets should work “much more” with animal behaviourists and “get comfortable with talking about feelings” beyond pain, including fear, frustration and anxiety.

She said: “We have the client there in the room with us, and we have to be incredibly considerate and empathetic, but it’s really important to remember that the animal does not have a voice in that consultation or in that situation unless we give them that voice.”

Bigger picture

The vet added: “We need to be very mindful of anything we do to an animal, because these are aversive experiences.

“For an animal to come into the hospital for a day, we need to be really able to justify why we’re doing these things.”

She concluded: “Putting the animal at [the] centre of decision making and contextualised care and understanding the five domains of animal welfare – it is not just about health, it is about the bigger picture of that animal’s welfare.

“If you do that and think about the journey of that animal and how they’re going to feel in relation to their nutrition, their environment, their health, their behavioural interactions, if we’re able to bring this all together, then I think we’ll make much better decisions. It has to be a whole-team approach. This is not about you trying to do all this in a 15-minute consultation.”

• The podcast can be listened to in the link below, via major podcast sites or on the podcast hub of vettimes.com