Small Animal Monday Schedule
Elevating the Euthanasia Experience, part 1: Helping Families
Dr. Sunday Cozzi, DVM, CPEV
Many veterinarians have received little to no education on how to guide clients and their beloved pets through the end of life process. Historically, veterinary education has discouraged doctors from sharing personal views and experiences with their clients facing tough decisions and instead focused on providing facts and options. As the field of end of life care evolves, we are improving our ability to help families determine what is important to them and empower them to choose the meaningful experience that they want for themselves and their pet. Yet, our responsibilities don’t end once we have pushed the plunger and helped our clients give their pets a dignified, loving and minimally stressful goodbye. The vast majority of veterinarians have no idea that the AVMA released a Companion Animal Aftercare Policy in 2020. The AVMA CAAP was created in response to high profile cases involving the unethical mishandling of animal remains by crematories. The AVMA CAAP outlines the duties of the veterinarian to ensure that the dignity of their patients is maintained, even after death, and ensuring that aftercare is performed ethically and responsibly.
Elevating the Euthanasia Experience, part 2: Getting the Whole Team Involved
Dr. Sunday Cozzi, DVM, CPEV
It’s no secret that euthanasia appointments are often dreaded as much by veterinary teams as by the grieving clients that schedule them. Veterinary professionals often don’t receive any formal training in best practices for handling euthanasia. Thankfully, there are a growing number of practitioners who are choosing to focus on providing an outstanding end of life experience. As public awareness of these services grows, the standard of care improves, and we do better as an industry. Yet, it is not only the veterinarians who hold the key to improving the euthanasia experience. Customer service representatives are typically the first and last team members that assist our clients, so it is imperative to ensure that they too are well-trained to support clients through these highly emotionally-charged situations. Expression of empathy and awareness of the verbiage used by the whole team can help to ensure the best experience possible by our clients. Improving communication between team members and owners is the single most important thing we can do to provide the most supportive euthanasia visit. Once that has been established, there are a number of tips and tricks that help to add the personalized touch that will help to earn glowing reviews for a practice’s end of life care. Euthanasia can truly become a practice builder once every team member has been empowered to assist families during this most sensitive time.
Skin Flaps Surgery
Dr. David Upchurch, DVM, DACVS
When it comes to closing a large wound or a skin defect left after a mass removal, it’s good to have skin flaps in your pocket (okay, not literally). Skin flaps can be made in most areas of the body, are large enough to cover many defects that can’t be closed in other ways. They require no special equipment, are not near scary anatomic structures, and, if they fail, you still typically have alternatives. So why aren’t you using them? In this session, we will talk about how to perform skin flaps from the planning stages through the execution. We will discuss the potential complications of skin flaps as well as discussing the common types of skin flaps that you should be able to practically utilize in clinical practice.
From Gold Standard to Goal Standard: Incorporating Spectrum of Care into Everyday Veterinary Practice
Dr. Brooke Davis, DVM, Clinical Assistant Professor Shelter Medicine
“True Colors”: What Practitioners Need to Know About New (And Some Not So New) Oncology Diagnostics and Treatments
Dr. Kimberly Reeds, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology)
In a world of new diagnostics and emerging treatments, it’s easy to lose sight of it all. What’s evidence-based, what’s marketing confusion, and what actually changes outcomes for the patient in front of you? Cyndi Lauper promised to show us true colors, and that is exactly what this session aims to do. Practitioners are increasingly caught between client expectations, industry marketing, and genuine clinical uncertainty about what belongs in their practice.
This session is designed to cut through all that noise. Rather than a comprehensive discussion of everything shiny and new in veterinary oncology, we will focus on the diagnostics and treatments generating the most questions (and the most problems?) in everyday practice. We will take an honest look at certain tests, including cancer screening panels, and ask the questions that marketing doesn’t answer: What do these tests actually detect? How reliable are they? And, what happens when patients arrive at the specialist with a diagnosis based on results that weren’t fully understood?
We will also spend significant time on the diagnostics and treatments general practitioners should be using but may not be, including flow cytometry, BRAF testing, and bisphosphonates. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating any new diagnostic or treatment before incorporating it into their practice.
Don’t You (Forget About Me)”: The Owner’s Journey Through an Oncology Referral
Dr. Kimberly Reeds, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Oncology)
For the oncology patient, the one thing they can’t afford to be is forgotten. Not by their general practice vet, not by their oncologist, and not anywhere in the space between them.
Cancer is one of the most emotionally charged diagnoses a pet owner will ever receive, and the journey from a suspicious mass to an oncology appointment, and beyond, is filled with moments where an owner’s experience can either be seamless or deeply frustrating. Most of the time when it does go wrong, nobody intends it to happen. The gaps that affect owners aren’t usually the result of poor medicine; rather, they’re often the result of handoffs that were never clearly defined and conversations that were never explicitly had.
This session walks through the owner’s journey one moment at a time, from the day something is found in your clinic to the day you’re managing their pet’s chemotherapy at home. For each moment, we’ll look at what the owner experiences when things go well versus when they don’t, and what practical tools can make the difference. Along the way, we’ll address diagnosis before referral, staging and diagnostic workups, shared patient responsibilities, post-chemotherapy patient management, and navigating the line between true oncologic urgency vs. emergency and owner anxiety.
The goal is (somewhat) simple: to ensure that every owner who moves between your clinic and ours feels supported, informed, and never forgotten.
When Can We Use Radiation Therapy for My Patients
Dr. Chieko Azuma, DVM, PhD, DACVR
VHC KSU commissioned a replacement Radiation Therapy (RT) unit (Varian 21iX linear accelerator) in this Spring. This upgraded unit delivers external beam RT and has capability of advanced RT technology including Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and Stereotactic Radiation Therapy (SRT). The goal of the VHC Oncology Service is providing comprehensive cancer care including diagnosis, treatment and management. Radiation Oncologists play a crucial role in the multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment, often working alongside with medical oncologists, surgeons and other specialists. RT can be powerful, convenient and flexible cancer therapeutic options in companion animals with wide range of cancer associate with different organs. RT involves directing high-energy radiation precisely at a tumor to target and kill cancer cells or significantly delay their growth. It can be used alone or in combination with other treatment modalities such as surgery and chemotherapy. The treatment goals can vary from providing a potential cure to palliative care. RT is non-invasive and can improve quality of life for patients with advanced cancer focuses on improving the pet’s quality of life and relieving pain. We will discuss 1) therapeutic use of ionizing radiation, 2) how radiation can be used to treat various types of cancer in different species and 3) how to work with the Radiation Oncology Service. RT is a vital component of cancer treatment and could significantly improve outcome for many pets with cancer.