How to better advocate for senior patients

Aging is not a disease, but its process effects every patient, so confronting it may not be easy for everyone. Continuum of care is practiced with wellness and prevention through the patient’s life stages, making discussions with clients to work toward an understanding of these life stages an important part for effective communication when a patient is approaching that time.This means to best advocate for senior patients; there needs to be unison between veterinary teams and clients to have the best strategies in place as well as help them understand any additional care that could be required for their pet.

Heidi Lobprise, DVM, DAVDC, from Cibolo Creek Veterinary Hospital in Boeme, Texas, shared during her lecture “Age is NOT just a number: Advocate for your senior patients!” ways to advocate for the senior pets at your clinic through communication, making it a team sport between clients and teams, and how to use the senior for better advocacy.

"We need to work with the caregiver, everybody on that veterinary team, so we can get clear communication, good education, and really impact the health of these pets throughout their lives," Lobprise stated to the room.

"When you start talking about senior Care, when they turn senior, they're going to look at us like, yeah, right. You just want another business model [and] money. Now we're going to continue good care throughout life stages," she continued.

Identifying aging pets

Unlike most things that are hard about cats, a less complicated one is effective communication for when their senior life stage is approaching because of their uniform body size and guidelines. Senior cat guidelines state that a cat over 10 years of age is senior.^2,3 For canines, it is more complicated due to the many body sizes in dogs. According to the American Animal Hospital Association’s 2019 Canine Life Stage guidelines, it stated that a dog is considered senior in their last quarter of life, but the life span is estimated to determine the point of time, making it not as simple as the public thinks.² To determine their chronological age and size, veterinary teams can determine their patients their unique life span.

Once the senior status of the patient is identified, additional recommended care can start. Sometimes, and Lobprise noted this may be inconsistent, veterinary clinics encourage those with senior pets to come in the clinic for semi-annual examinations accompanied by appropriate diagnostics. Regular veterinary visits can also help identify health issues earlier in the pet’s life to create a better care plan, while also continuing wellness and preventative care. In the case of senior pets, especially feline patients, they are brought in late into the progression of the illness they have when symptoms have become advanced before noticed and recognized as significant. This then creates the proception of health span plays a role, beyond concepts of lifespan and longevity, where pets spend ‘years in good health’ without chronic diseases, disabilities, or frailty.

According to Lobprise, the goal of maintaining health until the patient is closer to the end of their life and compressing the diseases and issues into a shorter time frame before death can impact the patient’s quality of life.

Talking about aging can often be assisted by comparing pets to humans because humans are given recommendations for early examinations and specific diagnostics assessments as their age. Veterinary teams can even use similar situations with cognition, frailty, mobility, and quality of life comparisons to help clients understand the need for extra attention.

No I in advocacy

Advocacy is a team sport between the veterinary team and clients. Teams should be educated and effectively engaged in the proactive patient care starting at the front desk. Client service representatives can work to see if there is a customizable option in the patient information system to include what life state the pet is at. They can then update it when a pet reaches a new stage. The clinic can also issue questionnaires or checklists for clients coming into the practice to get a better understanding of their pet’s basics such as activity, cognition, diet, mobility, and more. If possible, a dedicated senior waiting area with non-skid runners on the floor or quiet places for senior cats. Through this extra attention, when possible, it can help open a dialect between patients and clients on how they too can make their pets environment at home more senior friendly.

Veterinarians and technicians can also continue dialogues with clients by talking about issues such as activity or mobility. Often minor changes are determined to be the patient just getting old and that may be true, but early diagnosis of conditions can help for earlier and more effective intervention. Veterinary teams can encourage clients to take videos of their pets at home to demonstrate behavioral changes, declines in mobility, or indications of pain and discomfort.

A newer concept for many veterinary teams is the assessment of frailty, but it can help provide a better understand of decline and how to identify weakness, pain, undernutrition, and exhaustion through validated scales for canine and feline patients. For example, for feline patients, the 2021 AAFP (now known as the Feline Veterinary Medical Association) Senior Care guidelines can provide teams with 3 defined levels of intervention in the Frailty Prevention Model. The primarily level includes wellness and preventive measures, plus early disease detection through screening to minimize disease risk factors.

With all these efforts, any plans will work best when working with an informed client. Veterinary teams can utilize those checklists and questionnaires during the mature and healthy adult stages to teach clients to monitor for subtle signs and changes in their pet. Declines that come with aging will always be there, but it is better to start looking into them early to better determine which interventions or treatments are needed, if any.

"What we need to do is we need to advocate years before this time to make sure we get the best care they can have, and to prepare them for changes. [And] not just prepare them for changes, but have them help us look for changes, because if we can see early changes, we may have a chance to intervene at early stages," said Lobprise.

Clients want to do all that they can to help their pets, but costs can build up, putting a financial burden on the clients, especially in the case of chronic diseases or disabilities. Besides financial, an emotional, physical, and psychological burden can also impact and take a toll on their quality of life. Teams can be empathetic and reserve judgement for clients as part of the care they are providing because like their pets, clients may not be able to handle the burdens the same or could react in different ways, so communication needs to be effective.

Conclusion

Aging pets can be hard on veterinary teams, clients, and the patients themselves. By creating and it is us verse the problem mentality in clinics, veterinary teams will be able to help better understand the possibility of care for clients and patients to create a plan that works for everyone and could improve the quality of life for everyone.

References

1. Lobprise H. Paws in motion: Age is NOT just a number: Advocate for your senior patients!.Presented at: Hill’s Global Symposium; October 27-28, 2025; Phoenix, AZ.
2. Dhaliwal R, Boynton E, Carrera-Justiz S, et al. 2023 AAHA Senior Care Guidelines for Dogs and Cats. J Am Anim Hosp Assoc. 2023;59(1):1-21. doi:10.5326/JAAHA-MS-7343
3. Creevy KE, Grady J, Little SE, et al. 2019 AAHA Canine Life Stage Guidelines. J Am Anim Hosp Assoc. 2019;55(6):267-290. doi:10.5326/JAAHA-MS-6999