Technicians

Editor's note: Practice Life is a new column designed to offer tools to help your practice manage daily challenges, big or small, more efficiently

Help make sure you're spreading the microchip message and improve the chances lost pets will find their way home:

Q: Sometimes when we mention a pet needs to lose weight, clients blame the animals. How do we keep these conversations positive?

Q: We have an inventory item that has repeatedly been short when counted. It's a very specific eye medication ordered in limited quantities, and only a handful of clients use the medication. One of the clients has recently been sent to collections, and she happens to be related to a team member. I fear that the missing medication is walking out of the clinic in the hands of an employee. How would you recommend that I approach this employee? We are prepared to fire her for the crime, but we have no proof that she's the culprit. Help! -Suspicious of sticky fingers

Whether you're the reviewer-or the reviewee-it's time to embrace a new outlook on employee reviews. Hint: The manager may be doing them wrong.

Be supportive of pet owners when they're faced with their cat's diabetes diagnosis. Use these communication techniques to ease the burn of this challenging disease.

On the road to veterinary practice improvement, carefully crafted solutions that involve the team win the race.

Sick over work-literally? Whether you only pick up the occasional pet mess or you're in the back treating animals every day, you need to know how to control zoonoses.

Get down and dirty for the team.

Tip 1: Do the tough work.

Use this tool to help your veterinary team create or refresh your practice parasite protocol.

Want to fix what's wrong with veterinary medicine? First, remember what's right.

Follow these "next steps" to make sure your veterinary team is prepared to promote senior pet wellness.

This toolkit delivers team training, free client handouts, exam room education strategies and more, all designed to make it as easy as possible for veterinarians and their teams to explain senior healthcare and wellness to pet owners. (With an educational grant provided by Vétoquinol)

These three game-winning plays will take your veterinary team members through their paces with activities to refresh your parasite prevention skills and educate clients.

Denise Tumblin offers tips to give your kitten wellness plans some traction with veterinary clients.

This veterinary team member's lost pen served as a reminder not to take interactions with clients for granted.

A reader tip to learn from others before you make the same mistakes.

This veterinary hospital team works together to rid a Rhodesian ridgeback of a congenital cleft palate.

What do a pit bull suffering from fibrocartilaginous embolism, a Labrador retriever with chronic severe elbow dysplasia, and a beagle with ventral slot decompression have in common? These precious pooches are rehabilitation success stories that teach us to never give up hope.

Population: My veterinary clients.

Understand your workplace rights-whether you're a veterinary team member or manager-in four lessons from top employment attorneys.

Our kennel technicians would spend time running back and forth between our food display and food room, and they would often forget what they went back to the food room to get.

Consider these three ways to overcome client objections with advice from Liza W. Rudolph, BAS, CVT, VTS (Canine/Feline), a technician with the internal medicine service at Saint Francis Veterinary Center in Woolwich Township, N.J.:

You can handle their bark, but you don't want a bite. Firstline Board member Mandy Stevenson, RVT, offers tips for how each team member can stay safe in practice:

Your preventive pitch may be perfect, but some new veterinary client education tools could press more pet owners to do the right thing and keep up with your recommendations.

Use this advice to help out your veterinary practice's super-mommies-to-be.

A cancer diagnosis had become as common as a urinary tract infection. I had forgotten the impact of a poor prognosis.