14/07/2012
How to prepare your clients for a locum veterinarian
If you are like most veterinarians, you started your practice with few staff and even fewer clients. The challenge and excitement of starting a business can be all consuming. Perhaps you find yourself wondering where the time has gone, suddenly you are celebrating a clinic or personal milestone. Like many health professionals, in order to take a vacation you may need to enlist the help of a locum tenens.
While finding a locum is stressful, the stress is compounded with staff and client concerns. Finding the right person to fit into your practice can be difficult, then arranging logistics such as accommodation, travel, vehicle, especially if your practice is outside of a major centre, can seem overwhelming.
Here are things you can do to mitigate the stress of hiring a locum:
1. Use a checklist of required skills and clinic procedures when doing a preliminary interview with a locum. Ask your staff for input on this checklist, they may know things about your practice and your style that you don’t realize.
2. Understand that the locum may not generate the same revenues as you. Losing revenue is more manageable than losing clients or valuable staff members if the locum is not suitable. A loss of a few thousand dollars for a vacation is recoverable. You will never recover the time you are gifting yourself to relax or spend time with family and loved ones.
3. Give yourself plenty of time to find a locum through advertising, local veterinary associations, word of mouth or locum agencies. Start looking for a locum up to a year in advance, sometimes longer for busy times such as summer or holidays.
4. Allow a generous budget and be honest with what you can afford. If you hesitate on a locum that seems perfect because of their fees, likely someone else will see their potential and book them up.
5. Prepare your clients for alocum. Many veterinarians do not think to prepare their clients for a locum’s arrival. In my experience, some practice owners seem to just hope their clients won’t notice!
I recommend that your approach to preparing clients for a locum should depend on the situation. Some of your clients, with healthy animals, will be in your clinic for annual wellness examinations. For these clients, ensuring that they are aware that they will be seeing a locum may be enough. Other clients, with pets with ongoing health issues, may need more preparation for their vet’s absence. Direct your reception staff to reinforce the locum’s positive attributes when booking appointments. If a client prefers to wait to see their regular veterinarian, I believe that it is important to respect that wish.
If a client email list is available, a short bio with a picture of the locum will help with an introduction. Clients with anxiety about seeing a new vet may be comforted in knowing the locum’s background, skills, years of experience, and that locums will rarely drastically change existing protocols for chronic illnesses.
Advance preparation for the veterinarian’s absence and building expectations is helpful. Throughout the year, the staff and veterinarians can mention past or upcoming vacations, and refer specifically to good experiences they have had with locums.
You may wish to display a copy of the bio of the locum with picture, and a brief description of what a locum means, on display at the front desk for a few weeks before the new veterinarian comes to take over. Your reception staff can hand them out to clients in the waiting room, or at earlier appointments before their regular vet leaves.
In a clinic where locums are a frequent occurrence, the locum bio may be all that is required to give clients a sense of ease to know about the veterinarian they will be seeing.
With the tips above, hopefully hiring a locum will not seem as daunting. There will be some work initially to prepare for the locum’s arrival, but time well invested to keep clients and staff happy.
