Note: This post is Part 2 of the Veterinary Urgent Care Primer series, which aims to explain urgent care and how it’s reshaping the way you care for your pet.
The Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020 was an extremely scary time for some. Personally, I was 9 months pregnant and due to be induced the second week of April 2020. Having a newborn baby, I imposed my own mandatory stay-at-home orders for the initial 12 weeks of the pandemic. While at home, I witnessed my coworkers struggling with the uptick in emergency visits due to primary care appointment shortages as well as an overall increase in pet adoptions.
Using Human ER Medicine to Model Veterinary Urgent/ER Care
As I reviewed the presenting complaints, the majority of these emergency visits were due to complaints that I would categorize as urgent and not emergent. These visits contributed to the 8+ hour wait times just to be evaluated by a veterinarian and led to overcrowded ERs. Ultimately, the increase in ER visits led to high patient-to-staff ratios, the higher chance for medical mistakes, and critical patients not receiving timely evaluation and care.
As with other veterinary emergency care hospitals in similar situations, I turned to the human emergency room model. The Emergency Severity Index (ESI) triages patients into five categories and evaluates them in order of need:
- Level 1: Immediate, life-saving intervention required without delay
- Level 2: High risk of deterioration or signs of a time-critical problem
- Level 3: Stable, with multiple types of resources needed to investigate to treat (such as lab tests plus x-ray imaging)
- Level 4: Stable, with only one type of resource anticipated (such as only x-ray or only sutures)
- Level 5: Stable, with no resources anticipated except oral or topical medications or prescriptions
We took the ESI algorithm and adapted it to our emergency service, categorizing the patients presenting and providing owners with better wait expectations. Ultimately, we were scheduling “appointments” for our less critical patients and encouraging wait from home.
Our emergency doctors and nurses adapted as best we could, but in the end, had we had urgent care hospitals, we could have offloaded a good portion of our emergency visits that more appropriately could be served by urgent care.
Urgent Care is Making it Easier to Keep Your Pets Healthy
Urgent care hospitals treat patients that are between levels 3-5 on the Severity Index, allowing the more critical patients to be handled by the emergency medical team. They also serve as an adjunct service to the local primary care veterinarian by having extended hours into the evening as well as weekend hours. Pets in stable condition that can’t wait to get an appointment with their primary care veterinarian should be seen at an urgent care hospital.
We’ve taken the learnings from Covid and the best of human medicine and implemented them into our urgent care model. Along with ER-trained doctors and a full suite of capabilities, Ruby Veterinary is the solution to the long wait times, stressful visits, and high cost of the ER.
With pets and their parents at the heart of our decisions, we’re excited to build a future where veterinary medicine modernizes and evolves alongside human healthcare.