What’s the best approach to selecting patients for surgery?
There are many ways to select which patient is next for surgery. Instead of randomly selecting patients, we recommend an approach that select siblings be done sequentially so the whole family can go home at once.
If you have a centralized drug drawer, this person may also act as an “expediter” who’s role is to determine who goes next. We are not suggesting you mix cats and dogs up, but rather if there are two dogs belong to the same family they should all go in order. Then, when it’s the cats turn, if there are any cats in that family, that can can be done first.
Why do we recommend this approach?
Is it clears out whole families at one time at check out (assuming you’re using staggered check out, which we highly recommend).
- Example, if you have a dog named Jackson and you do his surgery at 8 AM. And Jackson has a sibling named Max, if you do Max at 8:15 AM. They both might be ready to go home at say 11 AM. The owner is auto-texted via HQ and they can come get both pets at the same time.
- Now – let’s say you randomly selected pets. You might start Jackson at 8 AM, but not Max until 3 PM. Jackson would have to stay up at clinic all day unnecessarily while he’s waiting for his brother. This is an inconvenience to Jackson, but also, it keeps your building full of animals unnecessarily. This contributes to noise, to staff time having to clean up after Jackson in his kennel, and in general creates more stress by having more stressed out animals in your care.
The key logic is – find the family with the most “siblings” and start there. Do the whole family so they are all ready to go.
With a little thoughtfulness, you can greatly reduce stress and improve safety by doing families first. HQ makes this easy by you noticing the “sibling” tool in HQ and using it to select animals.
When staff approach the kennel they will look at the name on the kennel card and the dog’s neck collar to make sure they all match. They will also note on the cage card or a separate caution tag if this dog is a caution dog.
Note: This is also where your drug protocols become relevant again. We highly suggest you administer a pre-med at the moment of exam that will now act as a chemical restraint and makes it much easier to handle dogs. Having sedation on board when dogs are taken from their kennels for surgery is a game-changing key safety strategy for all clinics.
