Meeting the needs of veterinary nursing staff

This week I thought I'd raise some of the challenges and solutions around the people side of veterinary practice - focussing on veterinary nurse employees in this blog rather than the veterinarians or clients.

What are the drivers for change?

As I see it, the drivers for change in this area are: 

• Under-utilised veterinary nurses - the skills that they learn in training are not being utilised
• Under-valued veterinary nurses - employers of VNs think of them as dispensable and/or not able to contribute to the practice value
• Lower than optimal wages - in many cases VNs get lower than the published living wage
• Lack of say in a veterinary practice situation
• Hours of work - often not family friendly, and little opportunity to work as a group on solutions
• Employers do not always take the time to interview/train staff in a way that ensures they are a good team fit and that they bring skills (clinical and personal) that enhance the team.  
• Higher than optimal staff turnover - staff leave due  to the factors listed above in many cases and the high cost of training new staff puts pressure on the business finances and prevents the business from growing and developing new services. 

These drivers of change contribute to violations of system condition 4 - which describes how it is important to ensure peoples' needs are met. The above list is a general overview of what I see as common factors in most practices but certainly there will be exceptions where practices are already doing many of these things. 

What is a vision for veterinary nurses in practice when system condition 4 is being met?

Image source: Otago Polytechnic School of Veterinary Nursing

If system condition 4 is being met in the veterinary practice:

• Veterinary Nurse skills are being fully utilised - the veterinary nurses are managing all aspects of routine fluid therapy, dental prophylaxis, collection of ECG tracings, radiography, preparing for surgery, caring for hospitalised patients, implementation of care plans, nursing management, nursing consults, nursing preventative health clinics, puppy preschool and kitten kindy, as well as providing basic nutritional and behavioural advice.   
• The employers of the practice highly value the veterinary nursing staff and involve them in practice decisions.
• Veterinary Nurse wages are always above the minimum living wage with some even offering shares in the business to enable employees to share in the business profit.  This further enhances the veterinary nurses feeling of being valued and of wanting to improve the business they work in.  
• Veterinary nursing staff are given one paid day per year to volunteer in the community, 
• The business implements a flexible work policy to make it easier for employees with children or those with outside interests to work around their other obligations.  
• Valued staff are able to consider innovations such as how a complete restructure of daily practice activities might improve efficiency, profits and staff wellness.
• Staff turnover is low due to high job satisfaction and all of the above, allowing the practice to grow from strength to strength with new initiatives to get clients in through the doors of the veterinary clinic.

Do the above factors match your vision?  What would you  add or take away? 

Can this really be done?

Yes! The approach to achieve the ideal conditions above is to show how each improvement (from the current state to the ideal vision) will improve profits/the bottom line.  Here are some examples of what can be done:

• Improve staff job satisfaction and thus prevent them from leaving - Each time a staff member leaves/resigns from the practice it takes the equivalent of 1 year's salary in costs to hire and train new staff back to where the previous staff member was. Here is a uk based article that explains this further.
• Keep staff happy and healthy - If staff are happy, they take less sick leave, are more productive and this rubs off on clients.  Read this link for more information on this. 
• Give incentives for high productivity - Share profits with employees.  There are many articles that show this to be very good for profits/the bottom line.  Here is a newspaper report on John Lewis and Waitrose in England who has done just that.

The above changes are not only good for individual staff members, it is good for the veterinary profession. Carefully consider these changes for your practice and let us know what happens. 
Even if it is something you have already done, or are considering. Let us know.  We'd love to hear your stories.

Have a great week.