London Vet Show 2023 – Talking about Successful Team-based Veterinary Healthcare
Thank you for choosing to attend our session on Team-based Veterinary Healthcare.
What is Team-based Veterinary Healthcare?
Team-based veterinary healthcare is a when the whole veterinary practice team work together towards a common goal. Whether that be the health/welfare of a particular cohort of patients or a client experience goal.
Don’t we do that anyway? To a degree yes, we are all working to improve veterinary health for example, but a team-based veterinary healthcare programme is more specific; identifying an area of interest, creating a patient journey and ensuring the whole team is fulfilling their role in that journey. Examples could be a geriatrics’ programme, diabetes clinics or a dental health programme.
How will team-based veterinary healthcare benefit my veterinary practice?
In a time of recruitment crisis for vets and nurses, you can use team-based veterinary healthcare to greater utilise your whole team in the pursual of your goal. By shifting some clinical tasks to your nursing team (for example setting up nursing clinics for regular weighing, urinalysis, blood testing and blood pressure monitoring of geriatric patients) you will be relieving pressure from your over stretched veterinary surgeons. This will have the added benefit of boosting retention of RVNs too, by giving them greater autonomy to use their clinical skills. Team based healthcare programmes are a great tool to retain ambitious nurses who might otherwise be looking to spread their wings elsewhere.
Animal care assistants relish having defined roles and responsibilities. Let them take on tasks which do not require an RVN to perform. Veterinary receptionists love being more involved in the team. In team based veterinary health care, they are hugely important in signposting, communicating and picking up missed opportunities.
This better utilisation of your team and resources will not only improve patient outcomes but also client experience and bonding to the practice. Boosting practice profits in the meantime.
What components are necessary for team-based veterinary healthcare to be successful?
This is the difference between just setting up some nurse clinics and a true team-based veterinary health care programme.
Develop a pathway
Each of your team members needs to know their part and be interchangeable with in their role. Firstly, you need a defined pathway or process. This ensures everyone knows what happens along every step of the journey; who is responsible, how/when they will feedback to the vet, how next steps are booked in.
The development of the pathway will be an iterative process and needs to have input from the whole team.
Consistent training programme
You will need to have a consistent training programme, which ensures that each of your team members is truly interchangeable within their role. Training is important not only when you are setting up the programme but also when new team members start and remember to ensure ongoing signalling.
Habit building
You need to look at how you affect change in your team – how can you help them to develop the successful habits which will embed your new team-based veterinary healthcare programme into their working lives.
Trust
You will need trust – your vets will need to trust the process and trust their colleagues in order to let go of some of the process – after all they remain professionally responsible.
Communication
Communication needs to locked into the pathways. Not only who communicates what, but also the messages you are giving. Everyone needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet.
Measuring success
You will need to be measuring success. Having aligned the programme with your business goals you can measure improvements here; how many additional blood pressure readings are you doing, or how often are people booking in the next appointment during the current one. However, when it comes to communicating this success, you need to align with your team members’ ‘why’. Why are they interested in the programme? It is unlikely that they will be motivated by making more money for the practice. Consider instead communicating the benefits to animal health gained, for example ‘Janice on reception booked in 8 additional dental checks this month – that is 8 dogs who have benefitted from the relief from the discomfort of dental pain’.
Client Tesitmonial
‘Both our teams use the system extensively, and although we have only had it for a relatively short period, we have found it invaluable to support our PSS inspection, for onboarding new colleagues, and just in our daily activities. It is great to have all our various resources so easily at our finger tips.’
Julia Mewes, Owner Mewes Vets.
How can Training-Progress help you develop a successful team-based veterinary healthcare programme?
What is Training-Progress?
Training-Progress is a process and training management platform. It creates an online practice manual of all your SOPs, manuals and resources. A perfect way to store your new team-based veterinary health care pathways and processes. Training-Progress ensures safe storage, easy access and regular reviewing of processes.
What does Training-Progress do?
The platform then integrates that information into a personalised training programme for your team members. This means that all your team members will be consistently trained, according the pathways you have developed. The ‘Added Goals’ feature makes reporting on defined areas simple and actionable. In doing so, you can easily ensure that all team members are up to date with their training for your pathway, especially after changes have been made – this ensures your veterinary surgeons can trust that the rest of the pathway will be working as it should.
How else can Training-Progress help me develop a team-based veterinary health programme?
Training-Progress also has tools to allow communication with the team. Sharing successes, modelling behaviours and ongoing signally to ensure your pathway continues to flow and all your team members are growing and developing with it.
We also have features designed to aid team engagement in the quality improvement of your processes.
Don’t delay – book now and be in with a chance to win a wine voucher
Thank you for taking time to visit our LVS 2023 events page. As a thank you, if you book a discovery call (booking to be made before 9am 20th November), we will enter you into a prize draw for a bottle of wine. – good luck!
Or watch our demo video
Event recording coming soon…
