06/08/2022
OUR DECISION TO REMAIN A CURBSIDE DROP-OFF PRACTICE
We have received numerous inquiries in the last couple of months as to when we will return to traditional appointments and allow clients free access into our facility. After much serious consideration and discussion with all staff members, we have decided that we are going to continue operating as a drop-off practice indefinitely, and for the time being also continue to control access to the facility. There is a whole list of reasons why, which I will explain below for anyone wishing to read further.
1. Covid is not over. Yes, I know, we are all tired of it and no one wants to talk about it anymore, but the fact is, as of this writing going into Memorial Day 2022, we have a staff member out sick with it right now. We have managed to avoid a single in-hospital Covid transmission to date, which I understand is quite a feat. We did this by establishing a set of rules and following them to the letter. Many of my colleagues who own practices suffered severe financial losses from having this spread through their staffs, causing extended shutdowns. With small practices like ours, if the doctor gets sick, there is no one else who can jump in and do the work, so not only does the practice have to close, our techs and reception staff get sent home without pay, and your pets cannot receive care. What we are doing has worked well for us.
2. Ability to provide care to as many patients as possible. This for me is the most important reason. The unprecedented growth of the Salt Lake area has put a strain on every service industry across the board. The area is simply growing too fast for service providers to keep up. And we already had a nationwide veterinarian shortage. We turn away requests for patients needing help every day. We hold space for same-day emergencies, but my receptionists come to me every day with a list and we find ourselves having to pick and choose who we can see—we triage starting with most life-threatening and established clients first, then go from there. It is heart-breaking to turn anyone away, but we can only provide quality care to so many patients in a given day before doctors and staff burn out and mistakes start happening, which is not acceptable. Having all our patients dropped off allows us much more flexibility to sort out all these species with all their issues and get testing and treatments and procedures prioritized much more efficiently. I do wish that every client could spend a morning as a fly on our treatment room wall, as I know they would be amazed at the way we manage to sort out the chaos. We do recognize that dropping your beloved family member off at the door requires a deep level of trust.
3. Reception staff efficiency. You may have noticed how hard it has become to get through on the phones. Our phone traffic exploded on us last year, with our team of 2 receptionists managing over 400 calls per day. We established a phone tree which only helped some and have partnered with PetDesk to increase our communication options. We decided early on that we would rather work with voicemail than make clients sit on extended holds because we respect your time. If our reception staff is pulled away from the phones to es**rt clients into and out of exam rooms and clean exam rooms between appointments, they would have even less time for their client communications.
4. New infectious diseases/need to redesignate space. Most traditional veterinary practices that provide hospitalization services have a designated isolation room, primarily for Parvovirus-infected puppies. Because an unused room is essentially money wasted, we did not include a designated isolation room into our rebuild. We could not at that time have foreseen that Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease would hit us 5 years later. As rabbits are 30% of our patient base and this virus is so fatal, we must have a place to receive sick rabbits that are suspect cases until either confirmed or proven otherwise. The very first rabbit to rabbit transmission of RHD in the US happened in a veterinary hospital boarding facility and 11 rabbits died. The obvious choice was to repurpose exam rooms as isolation rooms for the safety of all our patients. We are also currently dealing with Avian Influenza in the same way, although this virus is cyclic and will run its course and we won’t need to worry about it again for a few years. But RHD is here to stay and too deadly to not take every precaution with.
5. Poor behavior of some clients. Patrons, passengers and customers are all over the news these days for lousy behavior, sometimes escalating to violence, toward customer service staff. This unfortunately is not new for us and has become infinitely worse. Prior to the pandemic, an established client nearly pulled his sidearm on a new receptionist, because he was angry that she did not recognize him. Many of the situations that we deal with are emotionally charged, and we do our best to calm and reassure worried pet parents, but nowhere does it say that we have to tolerate entitled rude temper tantrums. My staff currently feels more safe and in control dealing with clients at the door, and with the state of things these days, really, who can blame them?
I hope that this brings more understanding to the “why” of our policy changes. The very bottom line is our commitment to provide the best care possible to the most patients possible. As I mentioned above, we do realize that we are relying on you to trust us with your babies. We will continue to do everything in our power to earn and maintain that trust, most of which just comes down to simple communication. Please don’t hesitate to ask for what you need. If it eases your fear to have the doctor come to the door to put a face with the name, or if you have a ton of questions and really crappy phone service we CAN bring you inside for a consult after your pet has been examined. We also understand that we cannot please everyone, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, then maybe this isn’t the right practice for you, and that’s ok too.
If you managed to read this whole thing, thank you for your time and caring about our team!
Dr. Harris
