Businesses around the world are dealing with the fallout of the Coronavirus pandemic and the impact it’s having on the economy and their bottom line, and veterinarians are no exception. Vets looking for ways to keep their staff employed and perhaps even expand their clinics should look at ways to offer orthopedic care to their patients.
Many vets are so focused on providing the best care they can to animals – and providing compassion to those animals’ human friends – that the business side of their practice often doesn’t get the attention it needs. But these days, everyone has their eye on the bottom line, and many vets are considering how to increase their revenues in an economic recession.
Inexpensive orthopedic tools
We’ve long advocated for veterinary clinics to expand to take on more orthopedic care, because we know that the tools needed to perform many orthopedic procedures and surgeries can be acquired for minimal costs. Adding orthopedic procedures and surgeries will not only make care more accessible for patients, but can also be quite lucrative for a clinic.
That’s why we continue to reach out to vets to show them how inexpensive orthopedic tools can be. Acquiring tools to start treating animals for orthopedic injuries can be paid off with your first two surgical procedures. That means customers would be able to afford procedures taking place in a local clinic. Affordable tools means more affordable care.
We understand that vets would rather help animals and their people locally, without having to refer an animal out. It can be difficult to send a patient to a surgical hospital hours away – which is often the case for vets located in more remote areas – knowing that the surgery can be very expensive.
Being able to perform procedures and surgeries locally could also end up reducing the number of difficult treatment decisions. Vets could potentially avoid more amputations if they could treat certain orthopedic injuries themselves. Sometimes those harsh procedures seem more affordable, but with locally available care, may be required less often.
Accessible orthopedic training
But we also understand that many DVM’s are concerned about their skills when it comes to these orthopedic procedures. That’s why we continue to partner with veterinary training institutions to provide training to enhance vets’ skills in orthopedics.
For example, you can contact the Oquendo Institute to take their training courses for veterinarians to learn practical orthopedic skills. You can also contact our US Distributor, Securos Surgical, for online and Wet Labs orthopedic education. Through continuing education and professional development such as this, you can easily enhance their skills to take on more orthopedic work.
We believe that many more veterinary clinics, no matter their size, could be offering orthopedic care. Tools like ours can be acquired inexpensively, and allow a vet to do orthopedic procedures and surgeries without having to buy expensive surgical drills or other major machinery.
Dr. Eric Wilkening, DVM with the DrillCover Pro
Expanding to offer these additional services will not only add significant value to a vet’s home community, but will also boost a vet’s bottom line with minimal investment of money and time.
Many businesses today talk about pivoting their service offerings to grow revenues, and vet businesses have that same opportunity now to pivot to include orthopedics.
We believe it’s important for companies like ours to not only make safe surgeries more accessible through affordable tools, but also with up-to-date training. We’d be happy to help vet clinics learn more about both so they can pivot their clinic’s offerings and increase revenues, even in uncertain economic times like these.
