According to the Taking Animal Health Forward survey(1) of 654 NZ veterinary professionals, 43% of clinic decision-makers said hiring skilled staff was difficult, and only 40% of vets and 26% of vet nurses expected to stay in the profession until retirement.
So if you can’t easily add people, the next best thing is to give your current team more time. Here’s how to win some of it back.
A booking call here. An appointment reminder there. Another call about a repeat prescription.
None of these jobs takes particularly long, but multiply them by a full day (and a full client list), and you've got a serious time thief on your hands.
Here’s a little experiment: ask your front desk team to keep a tally of routine admin tasks for one week. How many calls? How many reminders? How much time spent answering questions that could have been handled another way?
Then look at what you can take off their plate.
Your clinic’s own app, powered by Vetdesk, lets clients book appointments in a few taps, receive automated reminders and send routine enquiries through in-app messaging. Find out more.
Your veterinary nurses and technicians have skills. Lots of them. So why aren't clinics always making the most of them?
The Veterinary Council of New Zealand(2) encourages clinics to make more use of vet nurses and technicians for clinical work within their scope of practice.
Take a fresh look at who’s doing what. Are there routine procedures, patient care tasks or other responsibilities that could be delegated appropriately? The goal is to make sure everyone's expertise is being used where it counts.
Sometimes, the biggest time-wasters are hiding in plain sight. How far is the prep room from theatre? Where does everyone hunt for what they need most? Is any equipment old enough to slow things down?
Each extra step costs seconds, and seconds add up across a day and a team.
Walk through a typical procedure as a nurse would, and note every step that feels like friction. A shelf moved, a power point added or a routine rewritten may be all it takes. Bigger upgrades can go on a longer-term list.
If recruiting is hard, losing a good team member is even harder.
Clinics that hold onto their teams tend to back continuing education, treat pay, benefits and time off as part of the deal, and have leaders who say what’s happening and follow through.
Feeling appreciated matters as well. 70% of practitioners surveyed(1) felt the true scope of their work wasn’t well understood or appreciated, rising to 88% of vet nurses. That's a lot of people feeling their hard work goes unnoticed.
No need to overhaul your whole clinic by Friday.
Start small. Keep that one-week tally, find the tasks eating up your team's time and look for opportunities to make things run a little more smoothly.
And if booking calls, reminders and routine client communications are taking up more time than you'd like, that's something Vetdesk can help with.
Your clinic’s own app could take a few things off your team’s plate. Curious to see how? Request a demo.
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