Why The Veterinary Technician is So Important and Why You Need to Know! (Part 1)
“…The entire system was stretched to its limits, causing incredible stress on the people on all sides of the equation.” Dr. Ken Fisher, DVM
KF: There have been conflicting reports regarding the increase in the pet population during the COVID pandemic. An August 2021 article in dvm360 co-authored by the Director the AVMA Economics Division and the AVMA Assistant Director of Communications* reported that US shelters did NOT see a pandemic boom in adoptions, and that pet adoptions actually decreased in 2020 compared to 2019.
In contrast, a survey conducted by the ASPCA in May 2021 reported that 1 in 5 US households, about 23 million, had acquired a cat or a dog since the beginning of the pandemic, and that 90% of those households had retained those pets. In addition, an article published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in May 2021** reported that, between April-May 2020 there was a 250% worldwide increase in Google search volume for dog and cat adoptions as compared to the same time period in 2019. There was no comment on whether there was a correlation between internet searches and actual adoptions. Anecdotally, I distinctly remember being told that our local shelters in Pittsburgh were close to empty for a period of time after the pandemic began (for the first time ever), and that this was not just a local phenomenon.
Whether real or perceived, the influx of new pets into the “pet economy” placed an enormous amount of new demand for services on veterinary practices. On top of that, the pandemic caused veterinary practices to have to modify the way that they interacted with the public. Curbside medicine was the order of the day, where clients were required to wait with their pets in their cars outside the clinic, call reception to check in for appointments, wait for a masked technician to come out to the car to retrieve the pet and take it inside, and then begin examinations with the doctors while talking on the phone with the client. This was a painstakingly slow process leading to decreased efficiency and productivity.
JH: How we handled patients and clients then very much evolved-kind of organically as you would try one thing and it wouldn’t work and you’d have to try something else. And there was a big learning curve for everyone.
For Melissa, her office had the luxury of two different buildings, one for healthy pets and one for sick ones needing a higher level of care. But even that condition had its challenges:
MW: It put a different burden on us. We had our healthy office and our non healthy office …healthy pets at one building and anything that had the potential to need lab work or X-rays surgery scheduled in the other building … for patient safety and our own safety. The main office is where everybody saw the sick pets and they had a different burden than the other office. It put a toll on the clinic as a whole for that time period because we all had different views of how the other offices were handling things.
New Challenges Can Lead to New Solutions
KF: Whereas prior to the pandemic my clinic regularly scheduled 20 minute appointments, the pandemic procedural restrictions caused us to shift to 30 minute appointments, a 33% reduction in productivity and efficiency. As a result, we were being squeezed from two directions: increased demand for our services on the one hand, coupled with decreased efficiency.
JH: We solved that by having a form that we emailed out with their confirmation. We’d get brief touch points with the owner when we collected their pet from them outside. We would go in and our doctor would do their exam. And then they’d call the owner to discuss what treatment we were going to do and then upon completion we would get payment over the phone and return the patient. Then any additional instructions were sent by email. In some ways a lot of little things got streamlined. But there were also just a lot of frustrations…
KF: The way that most practices handled this was to close their practices to new clients, which only further increased demand. My practice was closed for over a year to new clients, and even then we had trouble keeping up with the demand from our established client base. And since most general practices closed to new clients, demand spilled over into emergency practices, who also couldn’t handle the load.
As I’ve told many people over the last few years, the pandemic destroyed many industries, but it was a huge stimulus to the veterinary and pet-care industry, to an almost crippling degree. The entire system was stretched to its limits, causing incredible stress on the people on all sides of the equation. It became commonplace for frustrated clients who were being denied services, or who couldn’t get an appointment quickly enough, to exhibit rude behavior towards my staff. On more than one occasion I had to tell clients they were no longer welcome at the practice due to hurtful behavior. As if the pandemic itself wasn’t stressful enough, my staff also regularly had to deal with clients that didn’t seem to appreciate that they came to work every day. Veterinarians at emergency clinics were quitting due to the overload stress. As stressful as it was during the pandemic in society at-large, it was equally if not more stressful inside our clinics. Many on my staff resisted wearing masks, or wore them improperly. Many on my staff were upset that the government was paying unemployed people staying at home $600/week while they made less than that coming into work.
MW: I think, post Covid we were just down to our bare minimum in the eight year span of me working there. That was the worst part when we were down those people… I think the the one thing we did encounter was a kind of a lack of trust with how their patients may have been being handled per se.
When handing off their pet:
MW: They’re not sure what’s going on behind closed doors. They had years of coming to us and being present during physical exams, blood draws, vaccines and a lot of other things- to then not being able to be present and I think in any situation that’s going to cause a lack of trust…just because you’re not there.
JH: I think people were a little bit more extreme in their emotional responses both ways. You had those who were desperate to get out of their homes and interact with people. On one hand you had the people who were extremely grateful that you were there and extremely grateful to have another person to talk to and then there would be people who would seem like they had just forgotten how to interact with human beings.
KF: And when Target and MacDonald’s started offering new employees $20/hour, many on my staff started grumbling about being undervalued and underpaid, even more-so than before. It became difficult to maintain morale amongst the staff, and it was not uncommon at staff meetings to have to address negativity in the workplace. And to a large degree, the labor pool of veterinary technicians dried up, adding more stress for those that were working.
Everything during the COVID shutdown was very difficult! As Dr. Fisher so articulately explains, morale and staffing remained the hot buttons. And both Melissa and Jeanne confirmed this for us.
And we truly rely on veterinary technicians! They are an integral part of the system.
MW: We’re trying to make our patients comfortable and happy and live the longest, best life that they can and we can only do so much without spending money because our patients don’t talk to us. They can’t tell us things. We fully rely on all of these little intricacies during a physical exam. We have to have a lot of knowledge to even get to the point of saying, “Hey, we need to do diagnostics to truly figure out what is wrong with your pet and treat your pet and make them comfortable and happy.”
JH: And sometimes it’s as simple as just being the person that the doctor bounces some ideas off of before they go and talk to the client about their plan.
In Part 2 next week we will continue with Dr. Fisher’s study. We will take a deeper look at the true and false perceptions of a veterinary technician and why we all need to think about this positon in a very different way. Their role is misunderstood. Their compensation is not commensurate with their human counterpart and the profession absolutely can’t do without them.
They are the Nurse of the veterinary world.
By Dr. Ken Fisher, DVM, Dr. Caroline Simard-Swimmer, DVM and Howard Swimmer
*The COVID-19 pet adoption boom: Did it really happen? , August 13, 2021,
By Matthew Salois, PhD, Gail Golab DVM, PhD, MANZCVS, DACAW, dvm360 September 2021, Volume 52
**Front Vet Sci. 2021 May 7;8:647308. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.647308
Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Spark a Public Interest in Pet Adoption?
Jeffery Ho 1, Sabir Hussain 1,2, Olivier Sparagano 1
