Whether you’re a neighborhood vet or an equine veterinary practitioner, communication is key to providing the best care. Vets face unique challenges when communicating aftercare and wound care instructions to pet owners. Further complicating things, innovative approaches to wound care, like amniotic membrane grafts, can feel quite complex and difficult to explain.
You’re also not alone when it comes to effectively communicating the benefits of wound membranes so that you can provide your patients with the best care. With these tips, you and your veterinary staff can easily provide pet owners with easy-to-understand information, so they can make a well-informed decision regarding their pets’ care.
- Understand Your Clients’ Emotional State
Some pet owners have a hard time staying focused while seeing their companion animal in pain and in an unfamiliar environment. Whether they are trying to soothe their pet or just get back home as fast as possible, they can miss important details regarding aftercare. Additionally, many people truly struggle to hear when they experience anxiety (which arises when their pet needs veterinary care) [1]. Finally, the complexity of wound care requires a great deal of information. Conveying so much information in just a few minutes can lead to information overload for owners.
It can be difficult to gauge how these factors are affecting your clients’ ability to focus and comprehend instructions. So, when you begin to address intervention options, let them know that it is normal to not get all the information you’re explaining on the first pass. It’s also important to remind them that it’s okay for them to ask questions at any time. These simple gestures will reduce the pressure on your client to fully understand the nature of membranes and open up the conversation to help them build confidence in their decision.
- Be Concise & Clear When Explaining the Benefits of Membrane Wound Care
One of the questions that comes up is where to start the conversation. Amniotic membrane grafts are foreign to most clients, after all. It’s important to keep in mind that, while the source of a membrane graft is fascinating, there’s no need to get bogged down in the details.
We recommend starting with the most important details: Membranes offer improved results in both the short term and long term.
After introducing the idea of a membrane, it’s easy to explain the benefits clearly and concisely, using these points:
Membrane grafts:
- Jumpstart the healing process for less downtime.
- Reduce the risk of infection since literature has shown they have antimicrobial properties.
- Allow you to treat more severe wounds.
- Allow a pet’s body to more effectively use its resources to heal internally and externally simultaneously (when used post-surgically).
- Promote the body’s natural healing response in contrast to chemical interventions.
- Reduce the need for follow-up visits.
- Reduce scar tissue and related long-term complications.
- Be Prepared for Questions & Concerns
After explaining the benefits of membrane wound care and a client’s alternatives, you will likely get a few questions from the pet owner. We always like to remind pet owners that biologics, including membrane grafts and skin grafts, have been used in human medicine for a long time. It’s important to add that they are safe and no longer considered experimental. The use of membrane grafts has been tested with exceptional results and used in many practical applications to great success.
A client may be curious about where membrane grafts come from, and you can reassure them that all donors go through rigorous testing and are ethically sourced.
If your client has questions about the efficacy of membrane grafts, you can reassure them that there are plenty of studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of amniotic membrane products.
We have also prepared a list of Frequently Asked Questions on our website.
Creating Conversations Leads to More Hilltop Bio Success Stories
Pet owners want the best care for their beloved companions, and we know you do, too. When you recommend Hilltop Bio membrane grafts, you’re providing your clients with a medical treatment that provides excellent results for the best prognosis. As you begin implementing membranes for wound care into your practice’s offerings, use these tips to make talking about them easier. With time, you will find that membranes for wound care are easy to offer to your clients since they work and you will have a repertoire of success stories to share.
Image credit: Eric Ward | Unsplash
References
[1] hearingassociatesmc.com/blog/the-connection-between-anxiety-and-hearing-conditions