We are all conscience of making sure the cost of many things now a day. We are also doing that as well at Lakeview Veterinary Clinic.
So I thought I would share some of the things we have done, and will continue to do to keep our costs down, therefor keeping the prices we have to charge as low as reasonable, yet still give the same good service.
One thing that is ongoing in Continuing Education. I know we all understand it is important to keep up on the latest information in any job environment, and certainly veterinary medicine is no exception. In the past, we have attended a big convention where there are numerous speakers every day for several days. But typically these are in big cities, and there is hotel and travel expenses.
So we are doing more online CE classes (I'm in the middle of one right now on diabetes) and attending more local (within 3 hr drive) conventions. We are very fortunate being in Peoria, that we can get to Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and even Milwaukee in that short time, so it is very easy to get to high quality conferences and still keep our costs under control.
We will share other avenues we use to show we are all working to keep our resources current and still keep our costs reduced.
The translator is something I thought about as I was talking to a client and was sharing how we call in medical speak : 'brachecephalic' which is the medical name for 'no nose', or polakyuria (straining to urinate), and many others.
It is true that to a great extent, I believe our job here it to take the information we hear, read and see at our different conferences and 'translate' it into language, and use analogies that will make sense to people.
A dog or cat with glomerularnephropathy, thus creating proteinuria. That probably does not make sense but to a very few.
But the analogy I use a lot is: The kidney is like the coffee filter, and when the filter gets damaged, some particles start falling through - the smallest first, and those are what we try to measure when we are seeing protein in the urine.
Let me know if there are other areas where we should 'translate' better. :-)
