1.4 Opportunities for Pet-Specific Care

       Nan Boss, DVM

       Best Friends Veterinary Center, Grafton, WI, USA

BASICS

      Tailoring your healthcare recommendations to the wants and needs of individual patients and clients is good medicine and good business. It is easier (and less expensive) to make the most of the clients you already have than it is to find new ones. Chances are good you have the potential to grow your practice by offering more to your current clients – services that can increase the healthspans of the pets they love. As a bonus, clients who have been made to feel special and unique tend to refer others with a similar philosophy to pet care.

      1.4.1 Terms Defined

      Healthspan: The portion of a pet's life in which it is considered generally healthy, in contradistinction to lifespan which is the quantity of time a pet is alive.

MAIN CONCEPTS

      1.4.2 Veterinary Teams are Teachers

      There are dozens of factors that influence how an individual pet will be cared for. Most of these are out of our control. We don't choose the genetics of the animals (but we can counsel; see 3.4 Predicting and Eliminating Disease Traits), their lifestyles or how the client was raised to treat or care for pets. However, we do have influence over how we deliver information to our clients, and we choose the services and products we promote and market to them. We have hundreds of opportunities every week to teach our clients about what is available to them, why it's important for their pets, and how we can deliver it. The better the care we offer and the more customized it is to the needs of the specific pet, the longer our patients will live and the greater their healthspans will be.

      We are responsible for the health and well‐being of our patients. If a pet dies from a disease for which we had a preventive or a treatment that we never told the client about, that pet's death is at least partially our responsibility. It is our job to tell the client what products or services would benefit their pet – without judging, prejudging or making assumptions about what the pet owner wants or doesn't want done. It is their job to decide which services and products they want. We should be giving them enough information to make sound decisions. We create opportunity for ourselves by giving pet guardians choices as to levels of care. Ways to personalize care for each client and patient include:

      We waste opportunities to better care for our patients when we worry about rejection, being too assertive or spending too much of the client's money. Instead, we should be providing choices and giving every pet guardian the chance to take the best care possible of their furred or feathered family members.

      By and large, our clients don't know all that much about medicine, whether animal or human. Nearly half of US adults are considered medically illiterate [1]. Many clients have difficulty following even simple instructions on a drug label or understanding a doctor's diagnosis and instructions. The majority of human patients don't know the names of their