A stress free visit

01.04.2016 Going to the vet for many pets is often a nightmare, so as vets any little thing we can do to make it a more pleasurable experience is important. Veterinary medicine is constantly evolving and with the increase in understanding of animal behaviour we have now better grounds to do this. My personal go to for anything related to behaviour is the late Dr Sophia Yin – a superstar in the veterinary behaviour world – and the reason why I barely ever scruff a cat in practice now. I actually feel very fortunate to be able to say that I have had more education in this than many other vet students. A lot of my education here however has been self-study so it is all about having great materials to learn from. Personally I believe we can be our own worst enemies when it comes to making it easy for us to do our clinical exams and handle patients. That new puppy that kept jumping around and wriggling while you tried to clip its nails that you had 3 people hold down and got totally frustrated with. Next time you see it he doesn’t want to come into the consult room. And he wants to eat your face off… Ooooops... Now imagine if that puppy had come in, and instead of needing 3 people you only needed one person to hold the puppy, and you spent 4 minutes to teach it to associate getting its claws clipped as a positive experience. The rest of the consult was spent making a fuss of the puppy for being so good and talking about preventative healthcare with the owner. How can this happen? It is all about the buzzwords low stress handling and restraint – along with trying to get owners involved. We want to focus on the positive experience. It is however important that every single person in the practice gets involved from the receptionists, kennel assistants, techs, nurses and vets. It is all about the total experience as just one bad experience can ruin the entire positive experience for the patient. And it is a lot harder to fix negative experiences than to avoid them in the first place. A good place to start is to dedicate a staff training session to this – there is a very good DVD recording of a morning seminar that Dr Sophia Yin did which is where I started my own education. About 5 minutes in it actually shows you how to teach a dog to get its nails clipped in 4 minutes. If you want to look for the DVD it is Creating the Pet-Friendly Hospital, Animal Shelter, or Petcare Business (http://amzn.to/1VQ5N8R). This is the best introduction you can have to understanding how you can use behaviour in daily practice. Once you have watched this with your team, if you want to learn even more then I would recommend the Low Stress Handling Restraint and Behaviour Modification of Dogs and Cats: Techniques for Developing Patients Who Love Their Visits (http://amzn.to/1URv4jw). This book goes into even more depth and helps show how to change different behaviours – and deal with more difficult patients. What I like is that they did research into whether you could learn the techniques by reading about them and seeing photos – and when they found it was not possible then they made a DVD with videos to demonstrate all the different techniques in the book. A positive experience is not just for the pet, you will become that special person that the pet loves that the owners want to see every time.