Alternatively Speaking: The Veterinarian/Client Relationship
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Dr. Anne Carroll DVM, CVA
n our last article, we talked about the impact of emotional stress on your cat’s health. What we didn’t discuss was that nothing impacts your pet’s quality of life more than their caregivers’ emotional health, including that of their veterinarian. It is true in all medicine, but especially in holistic medicine, that solid relationships between your family and veterinarian form the cornerstone of their healthcare. Like so many of our personal relationships, COVID has put stress on our doctor-client relationships and that has impacted how we provide health care to pets in ways none of us could have imagined. While some COVID restrictions have eased this past summer, the disconnect between client expectations and the veterinarian’s ability to meet those expectations has continued. I am not speaking for all of my colleagues, but from what I can glimpse on social media platforms and talking to other professionals, I hear our situation is almost universal. So I would like to take this opportunity to share our experience and hopefully take a step towards re-building healthy relationships. For the past year and a half, veterinarians and their staff have been frontline caregivers even though the state has not officially recognized us as such. Through the entirety of the pandemic, each practice had to constantly re-invent how to do their jobs to care for patients while keeping staff and clients safe. These changes did not improve our efficiency, instead, they created dramatic increases in time for even the most simple of tasks. In an attempt to handle as much client care as possible, our workdays became 12-14 hours long without relief. Some jobs are easy to walk away from at the end of the official workday, but certainly not this one. Veterinarians and their staff are driven by an intense pas18 4 Legs & a Tail
sion to help animals and their people. It is the relationships built with families and their pets that fuel that passion and is the reward for the demands of this profession. It is certainly not the woeful compensation compared to any other segment of the medical profession, or lack of time for personal self-health. But COVID put a literal wall between us and our pet’s families. It was a struggle to maintain relationships and certainly impossible to forge solid foundations for new ones. We couldn’t refuel our energy banks via interpersonal connections whether to share the joy in healing or offer consolation for loss. Meanwhile, pet visits that would have reinforced how fun it was to go to the vet with wags and snuggles were now sometimes stressful without guardians present, despite all our efforts. On top of all of this, the veterinary staff was still trying to meet client expectations at a pre-COVID level, and that unrealistic goal exacted a huge emotional toll that sometimes made our day-to-day operations feel too daunting to cope with. All of these behind-the-scenes stresses hopefully shed light on why you may have seen a change in your health care experience for your pets. No one likes ‘curbside’ health care, or the curtailed personal communication that comes with it. Even with offices opening up for more conventional interactions, I am sure in the past few months you may have called a veterinarians’ office and gotten the answering machine or have been told there will be a wait to be seen, or even been referred elsewhere. Even veterinary ER’s are overburdened and are turning away less than life-threatening cases. That is the reality of scarcity, and what gives great value to having a standing, current relationship with your veterinarian. COVID has magnified the need for people to decide what veterinary care means to them. Do you want to get your shots at clinics and only see the veterinarian when there is a serious issue, or do you want a life-long partner promoting wellness to maximize your pet’s healthy longevity? Of course, there are many gradations in between these two extremes, but the point is that you have to choose the type of relationship you want for your pets and then have realistic expectations regarding that choice. With schedules pushed beyond capacity, fitting in sick pets comes down to time and staff constraints. In our practice, we have greater flexibility to ‘squeeze’ someone in when we are current on their baseline info, individual needs, and already have a relationship with their guardian. This relationship allows us to focus on the health issue more efficiently, and that enables us to fit one more patient into our day. Despite all these hardships, I feel fortunate to still love my job as a veterinarian, especially my ability to specialize in holisFall 2021