If you are like most of us, you are probably wishing you could clone yourself and at least one of your colleagues right now. Most days, it feels like there are way too few of us doing too much to make work-life balance seem realistically achievable within the next decade. As it stands, the dearth of veterinarians means we are working longer, more stressful hours, which begs the question: How can we make ourselves more efficient?
I’m not saying I have all the best answers to the profession’s current time-crunch dilemma, but I’ve got a few. Here’s my advice for three different groups of stakeholders in our profession.
For associates
Work smarter, not harder. That is the bottom line regarding time management for individual veterinarians. Here are a
few suggestions:
Put it in writing
This applies to all communications, be it with clients, among associates, or with techs and receptionists. It may seem like everything takes longer when you stop to write it down, but everyone appreciates the elegance and irrefutability of the written word. This is especially true when a dozen things are happening at once. Verbal directions are easy to forget or claim were incompletely delivered. Concrete communication leads to better patient care along with a paper trail of intentions, whether it arrives by sticky notes, text, or via your PIMS-based notes systems.
Keep it simple with protocols and templates
Streamline your work by creating bulleted checklists for common scenarios (GI cases, urinary emergencies, skin diseases, etc.). Prepare client communiques, create SOAP templates, and standardize treatment plans in advance.
Systematizing your patient care with checklists may seem anathema to how some of us like to practice, but it is undoubtedly better to err on the side of cookie cutter than it is to miss crucial items on a list of best practices because we were running behind.
Spending a couple of hours a month preparing new protocols and updating older templates can save you hours of work a week. Best of all, it will help you avoid common mistakes and missed opportunities for higher quality care.
Endear yourself to the most efficient team members
If your team wants to work for you, they will work harder and faster. Your work will always get done more efficiently if they care about impressing you or simply want to remain in your good graces. Here is where baking brownies or paying for a coffee run goes a long way. Offering detailed feedback on their work product (especially effective when laced with praise) works too.
Most of all, practicing effectively and impeccably with a patient-focused mindset will win you the adoration of the practice’s best and brightest. Sure, petty bribery and indiscriminate flattery may seem cliché, but veterinarians who can appeal to their team’s creature comforts and inner motivations are better able to get their cases cared for efficiently than those who do not seem to care.
For practices and practice managers
A practice is only as good as its least-efficient associate is allowed to be. This depressing truth dogs almost every practice, but that does not mean there are no solutions. Here are a few suggestions:
Identify the laggards
Every practice has at least one associate who is less capable of practicing at the expected speed. If it is not already obvious to everyone, your practice’s metrics will readily identify these individuals. They are the ones whose clients complain about wait times, occupy exam rooms for hours, and generate less goodwill than the average associate. They typically cost your practice more than just missed opportunities for higher revenues; they tax the practice’s overall productivity and reputation, too.
Build mini teams
Instead of complaining about your slowest associates, do something about it. After alerting the offenders and schooling them in practical solutions, pair the slower souls with your most efficient individuals—techs and assistants you can trust to move things along and speak up when things are not moving in the right direction. Offer your mini-teams feedback on a weekly basis until things get resolved and do not be shy about replacing associates who do not improve in spite of your interventions. After all, efficiency is not just about money, it also affects team morale, client satisfaction, and patient care.
Invest in higher quality support staff
In a veterinary labor economy with little wiggle room, it can be impossible to even contemplate associate replacement. As such, the solution for underperforming associates typically relies on high-quality support staff—individuals capable of providing associate-level care where feasibly applicable.
Also, do not just concentrate on technical tasks. Consider that much of an associate’s time-consuming client communication (callbacks on labs and post-op concerns, for example) can be reasonably handled by personable, whip-smart techs with the ability to screen and triage appropriately.
For the profession and its leaders
It is not enough to expect veterinarians will be self-motivated and innately efficient nor is it reasonable to expect practices will find creative ways to stretch their vets. To make up for veterinary shortages, the profession will have to step up and devise creative solutions to the dilemma. We need ideas to help keep our heads above water so fewer of us elect early retirement, contemplate career changes, switch to part-time schedules, or burn out altogether.
Admit a mid-level professional role is needed
While it might seem graduating more veterinarians is the obvious solution, I would argue it is not the right approach if those who graduate are saddled with massive debt, feel overwhelmed, under-mentored, and overburdened as soon as they hit the ground running; have trouble passing the NAVLE, and/or elect to quit the field before they have barely embarked on their careers.
Might it not be advisable to start building a stronger support structure within our practices before rushing to graduate as many docs as we are guessing we might need to fix a problem whose origins, boundaries, severity and consequences remain unclear?
Create better support systems for early-career veterinarians
When recent grads claim mentorship, mental health, and work-life balance rank highest on their list of career concerns, we tend to wring our hands over our new generations and their work ethic. We can either complain about the young folk or we can admit we must be doing something wrong when it comes to making veterinary medicine feel like an inclusive, comfortable, meaningful place for early-career veterinarians. I would say we concentrate on the latter approach since it is more likely to get us somewhere. Devising solid mentorship standards and demanding workplace compliance for these would be a great start.
Demand more mental health support from our institutions and employers
Let’s face it, the profession’s most powerful players are working really hard to wring the most productivity out of our most vulnerable veterinarians without experiencing any short-term consequences for this kind of behavior.
Relative to its severity, our profession has paid little more than lip service to our mental health crisis. Maybe it is time we forced those who have the power to do something about it to actually put their money behind something beyond “burnout apps” or Better Helpers on speed dial.
When it comes down to it, I’m all for increasing my own productivity along with my practice’s. It means I have more time to concentrate on the parts of practicing I like best, but it should not be all about personal responsibility and judicious practice management. After all, I do not want to keep finding out just how far we can stretch a vet. We all break at some point.
Patty Khuly, VMD, MBA, owns a small animal practice in Miami, Fla. and is available at drpattykhuly.com. Columnists’ opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Veterinary Practice News.