Do You Know Who Your Vet Tech Is?

What do they do, these vet’s assistants?

They have the best job ever!

All day with kittens and puppies they play

Getting wags and kisses – so clever!

You’d almost pay to have their day

It just sounds so life-giving…

Vet technicians are almost magicians

Turning snuggles into a living!

What you don’t realize with those stars in your eyes

Kisses aren’t all they are getting.

Listen up, listen well – get a clue

And you’ll find out what techs really do!

Welcome to Veterinary Technician Week, a week that recognizes those who support veterinarians in caring for pets. There's a lot of misunderstanding about what vet techs do - let's clear that up, shall we?

Vet technicians – what people think they do:

1. Play with kittens and puppies all day
2. Assist the veterinarian with all the fun things they do
3. Play with kittens and puppies some more

Vet technicians – a partial list of what they really do:

1. Check on animals hospitalized overnight, getting and charting vital signs, cleaning urine and feces from their enclosures as needed, and feeding/watering as required
2. Pull charts of animals with appointments that day to be able to anticipate the vet’s questions and needs
3. Check each morning for emailed/faxed records from emergency vet visits of patients. If a patient was seen, pull the chart for the vet and attach the emergency hospital reports for their review
4. Administer meds to hospitalized and boarding pets
5. Ensure that exam rooms are clean and fully stocked
6. Assist receptionists in answering calls, getting records, and answering questions
7. Count out prescription pills, bottling and labeling them for the correct patients, and organizing vaccine vials scheduled to be used that day
8. Occasionally being talked to by rude clients like they’re a servant instead of a professional who is there to assist in the care of their pet
9. Assist receptionists in checking in clients with appointments, getting weights, medical history, and vitals
10. Assist the veterinarian in the exam room – holding off veins for blood draws, doing blood draws, obtaining urine and fecal samples, doing nail trims, gently restraining fractious pets, and often being clawed or scratched, and sometimes being bitten
11. Spend time in the laboratory, setting up urinalysis and fecal flotation exams, spinning blood, running diagnostics equipment, packaging samples to be sent to the outside lab, and cleaning the lab equipment
12. Cleaning the exam room between patients, often cleaning up blood, urine, and feces along with mountains of hair shed by nervous animals
13. Finding out the hard way that the number of techs it takes to pick up a 137-pount anesthetized Mastiff is one more than showed up to work today, yet somehow she has to be put up on the surgery table
14. Pick up the slack of other techs who didn’t come to work – they either stayed away or they’re there and just not doing the work they’re supposed to do
15. Assist the veterinarian in surgery, monitoring the anesthetized pet, cleaning blood from the floor so the vet doesn’t slip, packaging tissue for lab testing, following vet orders quickly and efficiently in an emergency, and sometimes reviving puppies delivered by c-section
16. More checking on hospitalized patients, cleaning out their enclosures as needed
17. Occasionally being yelled at by rude clients
18. Spending the day working in scrubs and shoes covered in various animal bodily excretions
19. Training a new hire while doing all of this
20. Checking all the communication channels – email, voice mail, text, contact-us form online – to be sure all client communications are responded to in a timely manner
21. Making sure the exam rooms are clean and well-stocked before leaving after the last appointment

Maybe you know someone whose job is like this, or maybe your job is like this, too. If so, then you know how stressful a day in the life of a tech can be. How to manage stressful days? The world’s second-shortest podcast tackles that often with evidence-based answers to common scenarios – all in less than 90 seconds per episode.

• Need a quick way to check for and release stress? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!
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• Want to learn stress relief from your dog? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!

Being a veterinary technician is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard work, often dangerous work, and most of the time, rewarding work. If you have a pet that goes to a vet, consider taking a gift of some sort for the techs and their co-workers to share. Your gesture will be appreciated more than you’ll ever know.

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