Emergency Medicine Best Practices

[caption id="attachment_13516" align="alignleft" width="515"] Dr. Callie Harris at her "day job" in emergency medicine.[/caption]

Dr. Callie Harris joins host Laura Reeves for a deep dive on emergency medicine, urgent care and which is right for you and your dog.

“I got bit by the emergency bug,” Dr. Callie said. “This is when the magic started to happen, where I recognize I was an adrenaline junkie. I loved working with really scary crazy cases and I also enjoyed being part of the entire team in my exam room. With very frantic scared pet parents, I knew that I could provide not only life saving techniques, but communication strategies to try to promote calm.

“This is what I tell that next generation of aspiring veterinary professionals, animal welfare professionals, anybody in the pet care industry, pets are attached to humans. They kind of have to be prepared to talk to other people because my patients, they don't get in their own cars, they don't drive to the practice, they don't fill out their own history forms. Guess who has to do that? The pet parent. So it's a whole thing.

“At the end of the day, I have seen any and everything. Emergency veterinarians, we're definitely like the Cowboys of our profession or Cowgirls or cow people, where nothing phases us. We will eat while we're looking at a really gross wound. We can just get through anything.

“The development of emergency facilities came about and so now you have practices that are just dedicated to seeing your non vaccines preventative Wellness types of appointments. We're really seeing the sick patients but even then, ER's became over inundated with cases, pet ownership skyrocketed.

“So over the past handful of years is really when we started to see the uptick in urgent cares in the vets space. And so an urgent care is going to provide that middleman if you will. So this is going to be the facility that's going to still treat those ear infections, UTI's, vomiting and diarrhea, coughing, you know, your standard, “my pet is sick on a weekend or after hours and I don't know what to do.’

“The reason why you would bypass an urgent care is for those real critical scenarios such as my pet’s unable to breathe or my pet is bleeding out profusely, my pet got hit by a car, my pet has a really severe fracture. These are going to be the ones that I would urge pet parents to drive past the urgent care and go to an emergency.”

Listen to the full episode to hear Dr. Callie’s adventure with Moon Pie the goat and more.