Alyssa Mages, BS, CVT, FVTE, outlines key considerations for veterinary technicians during triage, from rapid patient assessment and prioritization to client communication and team coordination, in this interview from the Fetch National Harbor Veterinary Conference.
An emergency patient rarely arrives at a convenient moment, and in those first few minutes the assessment often falls to the veterinary technician and reception team rather than the veterinarian. How a practice structures that window — who evaluates the patient, who communicates with the client, and who decides what is most urgent — can determine whether a critical case is stabilized in time.
Alyssa Mages, BS, CVT, FVTE, cofounder and chief visionary officer of Empowering Veterinary Teams, spoke with dvm360 at the 2026 Fetch National Harbor Veterinary Conference in Maryland about her session, "EVTriage! Evaluate the Patient. Calm the Clients. Notify the Team. Treat the Patient. Repeat!" In this conversation, she outlines building a team-based triage process, assessing urgency in the first 30 to 60 seconds, communicating with distressed clients, and setting up a formal triage workflow in practices that do not yet have one.
Below is a partial transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
dvm360: For practices that do not currently have a formal triage system, what are the key roles or workflow steps that they should establish to make sure patients are evaluated, prioritized, and communicated?
Mages: That's an excellent question. So when you are developing a triage process—and this is not simply for emergency practices or urgent care facilities—when EVT is working with any practice, we train with an emergency mindset, mostly because that's my background and the majority of my team's background is in emergency and critical care.
What you need to establish is a timeline. You need to have role clarity: who does what, when, where, why, and how. You need to have scripts ready. You're not reading off of a paper, but you need to know what to say and how to say it. You need to be very well-versed in what are the top emergent things that you will see, like vomiting and diarrhea, collapse, things of those regards. Understanding what it looks like in a cat versus a dog, because cats are not small dogs. Understanding that a Chihuahua is going to present differently than a Great Dane, and what this means, right?
So you have to know the science behind it, and it's in different levels, right? A veterinarian is going to know different aspects than a technician, than an assistant, and then a receptionist. But everyone on the high level needs to be in the same place, right? So you need to establish who is doing what, so you have your roles. You need to have a formal triage form, whether it's digital or paper, and you need to have that workflow so everyone knows what to do and when to do it and how it should work smoothly.
