AAHA-Accredited Hospital Day celebrates our members
It’s been good year for AAHA—thanks to our member hospitals.
Itâs been good year for AAHAâthanks to you, our member hospitals.
Among other things, AAHA accredited its first-ever hospital outside North AmericaâDaktari Animal Hospital in Tokyo, which last week became the first overseas practice to earn AAHA accreditation in our 89-year history. Daktari joins more than 4,500 accredited hospitals in the US and Canada. Another 125 hospitals are in various stages of accreditation.
And AAHA accredited our first 3 hospitals in End of Life Care (ELOC) Accreditation, a brand new option for veterinary hospitals.
But weâre keenly aware that AAHA-Accredited Hospital Day isnât about AAHA, itâs about our accredited hospitalsâand more importantly, about the dedicated veterinary professionals who work there and spend their days upholding the AAHA standards of careâstandards that reflect their own expectations of themselves.
Pam Nichols, DVM, owner of AAHA-accredited Animal Care Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah, and a past-president of the AAHA Board of Directors, knew from the beginning that she didnât reflect AAHAâs standards of excellence so much as AAHA reflected hers.
As she told NEWStat, âWhen I was a baby vet starting my practice the whole reason I sought accreditation was because I knew [that] as a solo practitioner, I needed to be excellent, and I knew AAHA could give me the hallway I needed to walk down to make sure I was practicing excellent medicine to the best of my ability as a solo practitioner.âÂ
And in the years since, Nichols has only employees whose professional standards of excellence align with her ownâand with AAHAâs. She said thatâs allowed her to bond her clients to her team, not to individual doctors: âI have bonded them to the fact that I have an exceptional team and we reiterate that over and over and over again.â
Nichols said that does two things: âIt creates a culture of excellence, and it creates a culture of pride.âÂ
âI am poised for growth,â Nichols adds, âBecause I have this exceptional Team.â
Scott Dreiver, DVM, owner of Animal Hospital Highway 6 in Sugar Land, Texas, and a member of the AAHA Board of Directors, started working at an AAHA-accredited practice straight out of vet school, and said the practice stood out because of their commitment to practicing excellent medicine for their clients and patients.
âSince then, being accredited has remained important to me because it challenges me to always do better, not just with the practice of medicine, but with staff and the business side of things,â Dreiver said. âAAHA standards of accreditation help me focus on areas where we can improve that might not have ended up on my radar otherwise.â
Or remind people of things that were already on their radar, but they may have forgotten in the hurly-burly of day-to-day veterinary practice.
âSome things just fall by the wayside, despite your best intentions,â Rebecca May told NEWStat.
May has worked as a practice manager at both accredited and non-accredited practices in the past and currently is Marketing and Public Relations Manager at AAHA-accredited Happy Tails Emergency Veterinary Clinic in Greensboro, North Carolina. She said that the process of going through an AAHA evaluation is invaluable in reminding her and her staff of whatâs important.
âFor example, when we went through our last evaluation at Happy Tails, we passed,â May said. âBut didnât do as well as we would have wanted to.â
Where May feels that they didnât do as well as they could have was in the area of CPR. She said Happy Tails had that standard nailed in the past, but the person in charge of it left, âand we didnât realize it was a weakness until we had our evaluation and had to look at it.â
She said theyâve since trained several staff members in that particular standard so that they know theyâll have it covered going forward: âNot just for passing AAHA evaluations,â she added, âBut for us. Because thatâs what we want.â Itâs the kind of excellent medicine her staff wants to practice.
How else do accredited hospital staff reflect AAHAâs standards of excellence? Pam Nichols likes to tell this story about one of her techs.
âOne day she was intubating a great Dane, and she held up am endotracheal tube and called to me, âHey Dr. Pam?â I said what. She said, âThank God for AAHA.â I asked why. She said, âBecause Iâve never worked at a practice that actually sterilized their endotracheal tubes in between patientsâor used new ones.â
âI told her, âThatâs really fricking cool!â That AAHA standard about endotracheal tubes was her personal point of excellence.â
Even cooler, Nichols said, that tech will use that particular standard to convince clients about the importance of AAHA accreditation to their petsâ health.
âIf anybody asks her why our hospital is AAHA-accredited, and what does that mean, sheâll say, âWell let me just tell you: if itâs not an AAHA-accredited hospital, you have no idea if theyâre putting a sticky, gross, non-sterilized endotracheal tube down your dogâs throat.ââ
Nichols laughs again. âAnd that is a very visual thing to a client.âÂ
If they didnât get it before, they do now.
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