Veterinary Technician

Job Description

Job Description:\n\nVETERINARY TECHNICIAN JOB DESCRIPTION \n \nVeterinary technicians may also be identified as registered veterinary technicians, certified veterinary technicians, animal-health technicians, or veterinary nurses. In many states, veterinary technicians are required to have completed an AVMA-accredited veterinary-technician program prior to passing the state?s requirements for certification or registration.\n \nVeterinary technicians must have a broad knowledge of animal science, medicine, and husbandry, including a basic knowledge of pharmacology and sufficient mathematical skills to ensure the administration of accurate drug and fluid doses. They must be able to successfully restrain animals, complete clinical laboratory tests, use multiple radiology techniques, administer and monitor animals under anesthesia, assist in surgery, and perform dental procedures. Technicians must also deliver compassionate nursing care.\n \nGeneral Knowledge and Tasks \n \nGeneral Knowledge \n \n\n Know the range of services the practice provides and the species it treats.\n Be reasonably familiar with breeds and coat colors.\n Follow OSHA standards. Be able to find Material Safety Data Sheets quickly.\n Know and use standard medical and business abbreviations.\n Use proper medical terminology when speaking and writing.\n Be familiar with infectious diseases, including their prevention and steps to reduce or eliminate transmission. Know the most common zoonotic diseases (infections from animals to humans).\n Competently speak and write the English language.\n Optional: Competently speak a second language commonly used at the practice.\n\n \nGeneral Tasks \n \n\n Always be in position and prepared to work at the start of each scheduled shift.\n Maintain accurate personal time cards.\n Enter the practice through the front door so that you see what clients see. Routinely pick up trash or feces from the sidewalks, or entryway.\n Maintain a professional appearance while at work, including clean and pressed uniforms or clothes. Change clothes during shifts as necessary to look professional and avoid carrying odors.\n Smile and maintain an even, friendly demeanor while on the job.\n Perform job tasks efficiently without rushing.\n Promote a positive attitude among staff.\n Handle stress and pressure with poise and tact.\n Be willing and available to stay late or through breaks, when needed, to assist with emergency or critical-care patients.\n Show respect for clients, team members, and animals (alive or deceased) at all times.\n Have the physical strength and ability to stand for an entire shift when needed, and be able to lift pets and objects weighing up to 50 pounds without assistance. Assist in lifting patients weighing more than 50 pounds.\n Maintain a list of tasks and engage in productive work during slow periods.\n Schedule technical staff.\n Supervise and direct technical staff.\n Direct on-the-job training of technical staff.\n Assist other employees as needed. Avoid waiting for coworkers to ask for assistance.\n Maintain your personal veterinary technician certificate, license, or registration.\n Assist in hiring new employees by advising candidates of openings, offering them applications, working with them to help evaluate their personalities and skill levels, and providing your opinion to the hiring manager.\n Participate in your performance appraisal, and, as requested, in those of others.\n Participate in all staff and training meetings.\n Keep up with new developments in the field by reading journals and attending continuing education. Attend off-site CE as required by the practice manager or as required to maintain your license.\n Organize and present training seminars for other support staff.\n Maintain constant vigilance regarding open doorways that could allow pets to escape from the facility.\n Maintain strict confidentiality regarding clients and patients for whom the practice provides veterinary services.\n Be prepared to handle any pet or facility emergency that may arise, including dog or cat fights, choking or strangulating animals, and facility fire or weather-related emergencies. Follow contingency plans.\n Follow established facility closing procedures to ensure the security of patients, staff, data, revenue, inventory, and the building.\n\n \nFront-Office Tasks \n \n\n Know phone functions, including hold, intercom, transfer, forward, and three-way calling.\n Use patients? names during phone conversations with clients about their pets. Know each patient?s sex so the pet can be called ?he? or ?she.?\n Possess sufficient knowledge of animal husbandry and basic medicine to answer routine questions or refer calls to appropriate colleagues.\n\n \nClient-Interaction Tasks \n \nPatient-Admittance Tasks \n \n\n Cordially greet incoming clients and their pets, addressing each by name, and check them in.\n Admit patients to the hospital. Provide counseling and compassion for clients, answer their questions unless it is clear that the attending doctor should do so, and ensure that all admittance paperwork is properly completed.\n Complete and discuss financial estimates for clients as directed by doctors or the office manager.\n Provide clients with handouts and brochures regarding relevant medical conditions, surgeries, immunizations, internal and external parasites, pet health insurance, and diets.\n Assist clients with unruly or unrestrained pets.\n Transfer incoming patients to appropriate wards and ensure their comfort. Identify patients with cage cards and neck bands. Check for the presence of appropriate paperwork.\n\n \n \nProcedural Tasks \n \n\n As patients are admitted, build a surgery, procedure, and/or treatment schedule for the approval of the attending doctors.\n Develop each day?s hospital census and/or client-update forms, starting with in-hospital patients, and assist with development of these forms as patients are admitted for day-procedures, surgeries, or hospitalization. Deliver copies to the front desk at established times.\n\n \nPatient-Discharge Tasks \n \n\n Coordinate patient transfers with front-desk, kennel, and/or veterinarians.\n Prepare medications and prescriptions for dispensing as directed by the doctor. Ensure that each prescription label contains the following information: doctor?s name; practice?s name, address, and phone number including area code; date; patient?s and client?s name; medication name, strength and volume (or number); administration instructions including route of administration, such as by mouth or in the ear; and product?s expiration date.\n Dispense medications. Discuss administration or application and potential side effects with owners as directed by doctors.\n Accurately invoice clients from charges on travel or circle sheets or records. Activate computer reminders and insert computerized notes, treatments, diagnostics, and diagnoses.\n Discharge patients. Instruct clients on the care of patients at home, the timing of recheck appointments, and warnings of adverse effects of surgeries or medications.\n Assist grieving clients and comfort them. Be familiar with the grieving process. Always be sensitive to background chatter or conversations that could exacerbate the anxieties and grief clients experience during euthanasia?s or deaths of their pets.\n Return collars, leashes, and other accessories.\n Handle angry or grieving clients with a calm and reassuring manner. Be familiar with the grieving process. Always be sensitive to background chatter or conversations that could exacerbate the anxieties and grief clients experience during euthanasia?s or deaths of their pets.\n Assist clients to their vehicles if needed.\n\n \nMedical-Record Management Tasks \n \n\n Understand the medical-record filing system.\n Locate medical files for hospitalized, surgical, or incoming patients.\n Record doctors? and technicians? notes in patients? computer records or on paper records.\n Make notes in patient files of all relevant phone or in-person conversations with clients, especially when notifying them of lab results. Place your initials after the entries.\n Verify and/or witness clients? statements regarding procedures, including euthanasia.\n Check files for completeness of notes, charges, callbacks, and reminders, making entries as needed.\n\n \nExam-Room Tasks \n \n\n Possess sufficient strength and assertiveness to effectively restrain patients and ensure the safety of clients and personnel.\n Clean and straighten exam rooms to prepare for incoming patients. Spray disinfectant on exam tables, wipe them clean, and dry them. Remove sources of offensive odors; empty trash if necessary. Check floors, walls, doors, and counters, and sweep or clean them as needed to remove hair, body fluids, and dirt.\n Obtain and record patient histories from clients.\n Answer questions and educate clients about basic pet care and procedures including nutrition; internal and external parasite control; immunization protocols; the administration of topical, oral, otic, and ophthalmic medications; spay and neuter procedures; and behavior and obedience training.\n Complete cursory overall examinations of patients and record your findings in the medical records.\n Identify external parasites.\n Perform suture removals, nail trims, and wing trims.\n Draw up vaccines and/or injections for administration.\n Vaccinate pets. Follow manufacturers? directions as well as AAFP guidelines for placement of injectable vaccines at appropriate sites.\n Dispose of used needles and syringes and other sharp objects as set forth by the practice?s policy and OSHA standards.\n Keep a small notebook or personal digital assistant (PDA) in your pocket to record accurate instructions, particularly regarding the preparation and administering medications to be dispensed.\n Inform the practice manager or doctors immediately of all bite or scratch wounds you suffer so that reports can be made and you can be referred for timely medical care by a physician if necessary. Clean all wounds quickly and thoroughly.\n\n \nNursing-Care Tasks \n \nBasic and Environmental Tasks \n \n\n Prioritize tasks to maximize clients? satisfaction and patients? health.\n Track comfort items that clients brought for hospitalized patients.\n Wash, dry, and store patients? bedding and the practice?s towels. Bedding should be in good repair.\n Provide occupants with clean, soft bedding.\n Clean cages when they are soiled, and scoop or change litter boxes as needed.\n Maximize patients? comfort with a gentle and reassuring manner. Understand that actions that would constitute animal cruelty under state or local laws or the practice?s policies will be grounds for immediate reprimand and/or termination.\n Monitor patients for vomit, blood, urine, and feces in the cage, and clean patients and cages as needed. Note unexpected incidents on cage cards or charts.\n Monitor patients? behaviors and note potentially aggressive behaviors. Use caution when handling aggressive or potentially aggressive pets. Request assistance when needed.\n Monitor changes in patients? conditions. Alert doctors to significant changes.\n Alert doctors to notable pathology identified during patients? exams.\n Follow isolation procedures. Prevent contact between contagious animals and others. Using the designated products and dilutions for disinfectants, properly disinfect your shoes, hands, and clothing before leaving isolation areas.\n Walk dogs on a double leash or on a leash within a fenced exercise area. Ensure that they are restrained and under your control at all times.\n Accurately assess patients? temperatures, pulse rates, and respiratory rates.\n Clip hair in a manner that minimizes clipper burn. Maintain, clean, and lubricate clipper blades on a regular basis.\n Complete and update cage cards.\n Use warning stickers and notations on cage cards and records as appropriate.\n Prior to discharge, remove patients? catheters and clean patients so that no body fluids or excrement are present.\n\n \nPatient-Treatment Tasks \n \n\n Understand the mechanics and application of standards of asepsis.\n Properly calculate medication dosages and volumes of liquids or tablets to be administered to patients.\n Maintain IV catheters so fluids flow freely; flush and clean as needed.\n Monitor and maintain urinary-collection bags. Record urine production on charts.\n Administer IV, IM, SQ, and oral medications.\n Provide IV and SQ fluid therapy to patients. Maintain aseptic conditions. Understand the different types of fluids and additives used in the practice. Calculate, add, and administer medications through fluids. Calculate and administer proper fluid flow rates to patients.\n Monitor, adjust, and maintain IV infusion pumps.\n Administer routine enemas.\n Apply wound dressings and treatments. Maintain a clean site. Understand the applications for wet, dry, and wet-to-dry dressings.\n Apply bandages in a manner that ensures that the bandage protects and/or limits mobility and remains properly applied. Cover and maintain bandages as needed to preserve function and cleanliness.\n Use cotton swabs to clean ears, bulb syringes to flush them, curettes to remove debris, and catheters to irrigate ear canals. Administer ear treatments without causing trauma, and teach clients how to complete this task.\n Trim nails to the quick without causing bleeding.\n Provide physical therapy and hydrotherapy to patients as instructed.\n Provide medical grooming, including medicated baths, dips, and mat removal.\n Understand how to stop bleeding by using styptic pencils, powder or other means.\n Deflea patients with flea combs, flea sprays, spot-on topicals, baths, or appropriate medication.\n Detick patients with tick-removal instruments or medications.\n Identify a patient?s level of pain and possible causes of pain, and understand the medications and methods used to control pain.\n Assist kennel staff in medicating and treating boarders.\n\n \nTechnical Tasks \n \nGeneral Technical Tasks \n \n\n Restrain pets in a manner that allows necessary work to be performed, minimizes patient stress, and ensures their safety and that of other people.\n Safely and effectively apply and use restraint devices, including muzzles, towels, gloves, and cat bags.\n Perform venipunctures using patients? cephalic, saphenous, and jugular veins in a manner that minimizes trauma to patients and injury to veins and allows you to successfully obtain non hemolyzed blood samples.\n Collect urine and fecal samples. When required, perform urinary catheterizations on male dogs or cystocenteses on male and female dogs, cats, and pocket pets.\n Aseptically place cephalic, saphenous, and jugular intravenous catheters without causing patient trauma.\n Stain needle aspirates as requested.\n Type-match blood samples. Perform blood transfusions: set up filters for whole-blood administration, oversee administration of blood and blood products, and monitor patients for transfusion reactions.\n Set up and record diagnostic multi-lead ECG tracings.\n Make effective smears from vaginal swabs.\n Obtain ear swabs and