ABSTRACT: Awareness for improving patients’ veterinary experiences is growing. A patient-friendly approach is not only considered better for our patients, but it makes working with them easier and safer for staff, saves time and makes day- to-day work with animals more fulfilling. This article discusses approaches to caring for patients’ behavioural/emotional welfare while attending to their clinical needs, highlighting ways to achieve this. Patients’ emotional welfare could be argued to be the animal’s highest priority, so how can we make this happen alongside providing the best possible clinical care, as part of our aspiration towards an evidence-based approach to veterinary care?

Author

Linda Ryan (Roberts) DipAVN (Medical) VTS (Oncology)

Linda has been a VN for 18 years, starting in genera practice & then working in specialist clinics at 2 university referral hospitals. She has attained the Diploma ir Advanced Nursing (Medical) and the Veterinary Technician Specialty (Oncology). She is a qualified animal trainer & behaviour practitioner: Linda’s specialist interests are in clinical behaviour; medical/oncology nursing, as well as patient quality of life/welfare. Linda runs Inspiring Pet Teaching (http://www.inspiringpets.com/), aimed at pet & owner training & education, & CPD provision for VNs & para-professionals. She is passionate about low-stress handling and patient-friendly practice and regularly teaches on this topic to veterinary professionals, & she continues to study in this field.

Emails: www.inspiringpets.com,linda@inspiringpets.com

Keywords: Fear-free; low stress; anxiety; fear; safety

To cite this article: Veterinary Nursing Journal • VOL 33 (06) • June 2018 pp171-174

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