WEB Vetnews May 2015

Article I Artikel

NEXT! vs “Please come in, Mrs Smith.”

Dr Aileen Pypers

Survey results of the use of appointments in South African veterinary practices

How many veterinary practices in South Africa make use of an appointment system? For those that do, what are the advantages and disadvantages? For those that don’t, what is the reasoning behind the thinking?

T hese were some of the questions I discussed with colleagues at lunch one day (that elusive time in the middle of the day when one should be providing one’s body with sustenance of some sort). Not knowing how else to get these answers other than asking the vets, we threw together a quick survey on Google forms and sent it off to Vethouse with the request that they distribute it to the members. We were flabbergasted when we received 79 responses within the first day of the link going out! By the time the survey closed, there were 155 responses representing at least 97 practices. The majority of practices that responded were multivet (three or more veterinarians) followed by practices with only one veterinarian (see Figure 1). Because of the nature of the survey (spur of the moment, no research proposal submitted) we made a few rookie mistakes – for example not providing definitions for terms like rural, city, generalist and specialist and expecting that everyone will have the responded were general practices situated in city areas. (Figure 2) Categories were not defined and practices were allowed to choose whichever categories they fell into and this was not restricted to a single same understanding of them. The majority of practices that

• Appointments are compulsory • I only see emergencies without an appointment • Walk-ins get the next available appointment • Clients with appointments are given priority over non-emergency walk- ins • I prefer clients to make appointments but allow walk-in clients too • I never use appointments • I try to use appointments but it doesn’t work in my practice • Clients late for an appointment may lose it and have to take the next available appointment • Other 36 practices (23% of respondents) chose ‘I never make use of appointments’ and provided the following reasons:

Figure 1: Number of practices grouped by number of vets

Figure 2: Practices characterised by type

selection, so a practice could choose city and then both specialist and general for example. To try and capture all the possible variations of an appointment system, respondents were given free choice of the following statements:

Figure 3: Reasons selected for not making use of appointments

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