Plant Team Seeds and the Hospital Grows

By Ashley Elliott, CVT

A coworker once told me she wanted to make being a receptionist a career, and that statement has stayed with me. Too often, non-credentialed veterinary professionals feel like they have no room to grow and that they are stuck in their position exactly as it is, unless they go back to school or become team leaders. It is important to provide opportunities for professional growth for the entire team, including those without letters behind their names. It is an investment in the most valuable part of your hospital. You are planting team seeds so you can harvest hospital growth.

Here are some ways this can happen: 1. Offer outside training for all positions. This could be in the form of specialists from outside of your hospital coming in to teach valuable skills or as a continuing education (CE) allowance for all positions. An example would be a technician from a specialty hospital coming to your hospital to train the staff on dental radiography or online CE to train the customer care team on telephone etiquette. 2. Promote from within when appropriate. Not everyone is leadership material and obviously you can’t have a whole team of managers. Focus on your staff’s strengths and interests, and consider empowering them to take charge of that area of focus. This could be promoting an assistant to being in charge of laboratory equipment maintenance. 3. Talk to your team! Communicate with your customer care and patient care team members regularly—as a group and individually. Find out what they want and need for their own professional growth, as a team, and as a whole hospital. These conversations remind them how important and valuable they are and give them opportunities to be heard.

In times when staffing is most difficult to find and secure, it is important to value the staff you have, but also to utilize them to their full potential. This mentality will not only help your hospital by maximizing your staff’s potential, but also make your individual team members feel that much more important and invested in your hospital. Like many other hospital managers within the Commonwealth, I have interviewed numerous candidates for various positions. In my experience, one of the leading causes for nondoctor veterinary professionals to leave a hospital is lack of opportunity for growth or feeling like they are being held back from learning new skills they had expressed interest in previously. Team members need to feel like they are able to learn new things and apply them and that they can grow within the hospital, with or without letters behind their name.

Secondary education is not necessarily possible for every working veterinary professional, so we need to provide opportunities for these individuals to still feel valued for the skill set they have to offer. As a practice manager, my hospital needs a mix of credentialed and noncredentialed veterinary staff to succeed. It’s important that we acknowledge that as an industry. I need my receptionist and veterinary assistants as much as I need my credentialed veterinary technicians and veterinarians. One of the scariest things to say in a veterinary hospital is “this is the way we’ve always done it” and it also applies to professional growth. Continue to provide your team with opportunities to grow, but also continue to hire team members who want to grow and learn as well. Veterinary medicine is always changing and your team should grow and change along with it!

About the Author: Ashley Elliott, CVT, is the practice manager at the Animal Hospital of Chester County, located in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She was the 2021 PVMA Practice Manager of the Year. She has had a well-rounded career in numerous areas of veterinary medicine including academia, general practice, and specialty and emergency medicine. Her current focus is on building team relationships and growing as a leader.