Smart Flow Blog

 

Veterinary practices rely a lot on team work. Everything in a clinic runs alot smoother, more efficiently, and quickly if everyone works together. Communication is a big key factor in team work, as is mutual respect and understanding. Communication tools such as a patient management software (like Smartflow!), pagers, intercom, post it notes, emails etc are great for keeping all your staff in the loop of what is happening. Respect is a big part of making a team work, because if there is no respect, chances are your team will not work well together. Teamwork is key, for the health of your patients, the happiness of your clients, the well being of your technicians, and the efficiency of your practice. Being a part of a team takes work, though, as it has to be a joint effort. So, what can you do when your team is failing to communicate, failing to cooperate, and starting to fall apart? I read a great article the other day by Karyn Gavzer for dvm 360 on how to make your staff work as a team and have summarized the key points below.

Here are some ways that you can get your team back together :

So I live in Ottawa, and it has been snowing, or raining, or freezing, or doing something wintery for the past couple of days now, and it is cold. This just makes me want to stay at home. I just want to put on some warm and fuzzy socks, climb into bed, bury myself under a pile of cats and watch Netflix. Specifically Stranger Things, or Gilmore Girls (they're back!), Grey's Anatomy, or any sappy Rom Com I can get my hands on. I want to make a giant mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows (and Baileys?!) and never leave the comfort of my giant down blanket. 

Alas, I need to work because I'm a (supposedly) functioning adult and a contributing member to society. So I force my butt out of bed. I take a scalding shower, put on my scrubs (or my jeans, if I happen to be working from home for Smart Flow), race from my house to my car huddled in my winter jacket, and wait patiently for my car to warm up before turning up the heat full blast and pretending that I'm warm. Mind you, I know that I live in Canada and I'm supposed to enjoy and cherish winter, go play in the snow and go ice skating, but I sometimes I just can't deal. Besides, I can't ice skate for the life of me. (My balance is atrocious!) 

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Veterinary professionals in clinics tend to love gross things that non-veterinary professionals think are disgusting, we all know this to be true. I have never heard anyone get as excited about a pus filled abscess than people that work in clinics. I remember coming home from my first abscess, pus and blood on my shoes and a big smile on my face. I sat at the dinner table and went to tell my boyfriend all about it, until I realized for non veterinary professions, pus and blood talk is not necessarily the most appropriate topic to discuss over food. But I was hooked from there on out and grew to adore all things gross and messy that happen in clinic. 

I don’t know about all of you, but I very rarely have perfect scrub days in clinic. I’m talking like those days where there’s not a single drop of blood on my shirt, or urine on my pants, or diarrhea on my shoes. I took to wearing crocs because I was tired of trying to wash my shoes and make them look unstained. I’ve become inclined to wearing dark colored scrub pants, and seem to jinx myself everytime I wear a white Supergirl scrub top my parents got for me for my birthday one year; inevitably that day will become an abscess or ‘my dog ate underwear again’ kind of day. But, to me, messy days can be fun! So I’ve made a list of the top messy (and sometimes gross) procedures that vets and techs love doing while in clinic, that we don’t mind getting our scrubs a little dirty over:

This week was Veterinary Technician appreciation week! I’m sure everyone saw a lot of posts around with messages of appreciation and gratitude for the hard work techs put in. I know that in my clinic, there were posters made by some caring vets and emergency overnight kits made up that included the 3C necessities: candy, chocolate and caffeine. While I think it’s wonderful that us lucky techs get a whole week dedicated to us, I think working together year round to make everyone’s lives easier, and doing little day to day things for each other are just as important. So without further ado, here are the top seven things you can do for each other in the clinic to brighten someone’s day:

As people in the vet community, we probably at one point or another have had a dog in our lives, and this dog was or is most likely a perfect-to-us dog. They’re gentle, loving, snuggly, trained (hopefully), and we know them better than we know ourselves. They give us love like no one else in this world can and pick us up when we’re down. They’re dog-gone great. But I think sometimes having that perfect dog at home can make us an unperfect tech, because we forget that not all dogs come from the same place. 

What's 'the back' and why are you taking my baby back there!

I don’t know about you and your clinic, but in my clinic, we have exam rooms ‘in the front’ of the hospital, and then a treatment area ‘in the back’. The back is ‘off limits’ to clients and the door to the place where the magic happens, so to speak, is clearly marked with ‘Employees Only’. Does that always keep the clients out? No, but it does deter most.

 I wasn’t always sure I wanted to have kids, but I was always sure that I wanted to have puppies. All the dogs in my herd I acquired as puppies. I went through the potty training stage, the chewing stage, the setting boundaries stage, and so on. At times it was difficult finding a pee spot here or a chewed up sock there. Now that I have a human child, I am not really sure what I got myself into.

The one thing I know for sure is that puppies are much easier to care for than toddlers and here is why:

It may come as no surprise (if you are a Smart Flow guru), that there are many ways to use the patient management system. Our team has found that clinics have so many different ways to approach how Smart Flow is used in their own flow of clinic events.

While we are constantly updating the system and making things even more awesome, there are some hidden treasures that some clinics are unaware of. Here is just one of the great hidden treasures to Smart Flow.

It really might be that I have a hard time making new friends or that I work so many hours I don't even know where to start. Of course, I have my long-time friends from way back before I even knew what veterinary medicine was all about and they've grown accustomed to my career path. However, I find it so much easier to just surround myself with people that understand me best and that means lots of veterinary professionals. Here's why: