Introduction

Customer experience offers the opportunity for a practice to demonstrate a real point of difference in an increasingly competitive market. RVNs are best placed to provide warm and professional preventative care, freeing up time for vets to focus on complex/diagnostic caseload.

Objectives

In order to identify how often opportunities to refer to the nursing team are taken up, veterinary consultations were monitored in practices offering nurse clinic appointments. The hypothesis is that although vets say they refer clients on to the nursing team for preventative healthcare, most don't actually do it.

Methods

Cameras were installed in the consult rooms of five UK practices, to remotely observe 100 consultations. The same person observed and scored all consultations in order to ensure consistency and accuracy.

Results

Filmed evidence finds the percentage of owners referred to the registered veterinary nurse, RVN, where it was appropriate to refer for advice and support is very low:

 4% for flea/worm advice

 4% for weight advice

 0% for dental advice

 0% for senior clinics

 0% for long-term medication clinics

Practices making RVN referrals and recommendations report many benefits:

 Bonding clients to the practice

 Increased footfall

 Increased sales of preventative healthcare

 More neuters

 Improved uptake of annual vaccination

Conclusions

Only a very small minority of vet consultations feature a referral to the RVN. RVN knowledge and time are therefore being underutilised in the UK currently.