Connell Provides Update on VMTH During College Hour
Texas A&M’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital (VMTH) has spent the past year adapting to an increased caseload and working to create an environment that embraces opportunities for improvement and increased efficiency.
Bo Connell, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM) assistant dean of hospital operations, shared with CVM faculty, staff, and students some of the ways the VMTH is working to address those issues during his College Hour update on Friday, Feb. 23.
Among the unique challenges faced by the VMTH are those associated with operating as an academic business and the changes in clientele.
“A quote that I really like a lot is, ‘We do not practice veterinary medicine at the hospital to make money. We make money so that we can practice veterinary medicine,’” Connell said. “We provide patient care services directly to the public. It’s really unique on campus; we’re the only one that does this.”
The caseloads seen by the Small Animal Hospital (SAH) and Large Animal Hospital (LAH) reflect one of the challenges the hospital currently faces—that of room to accommodate the almost 29,000 patients that visited the VMTH during the last fiscal year.
“This (caseload) is growing quite a bit,” Connell said. “I think when the hospitals were originally built, we were probably seeing a few thousand cases. They were in the same footprint, and we’re seeing substantially higher number of cases in both of those facilities right now.”
The increased caseload has impacted the staffing at the hospital, who, in addition to providing clinical services to the clients, are also charged with teaching students and training specialists.
“Right now, we have 430 positions in the hospital, with 61 open positions that we’re recruiting for,” Connell said. “Most of those are veterinary technicians. We hope to have those positions filled pretty quickly because those are the support people, the nursing staff that is providing support for the faculty.”
A complicating factor is that veterinary technicians are playing an increasingly important role in the hospital’s functions, Connell said.
“It’s a team effort—a lot of people working together to teach and train,” he said, adding that a survey of veterinary technicians found that the nursing staff devotes approximately 42 percent of their day engaged in activities outside of their technician responsibilities, including direct teaching, training, and research activities. “Again, in the teaching hospital, what we’re doing is teaching the best students. We’re training residents, we’re engaged in research activities, and we’re just a really, really big classroom that probably needs to be bigger.”
In addressing these issues, Connell’s team has devised a strategic plan that includes a new mission statement (“Achieving a better life through compassion, innovation, and discovery”) and “big-dot, high-level objectives” that include improving service quality and staff satisfaction. That process includes an Adverse Events Recording Committee, comprising hospital faculty and administrators, and a new digital system that allows the committee to record reports of adverse events, which can be made by emailing ideas@cvm.tamu.edu.
“We think that this is going to be helpful,” he said. “It’s another way for us to embed this culture of continuous quality improvement throughout the institution.”
In addressing the growing caseload, Connell said the VMTH has added a number of new clinical positions and services—including in the SAH a surgical oncologist, orthopedic surgeon, and a doctor who will work to revitalize the Sports Medicine & Rehabilitation program, as well as renovations to the Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology treatment areas and a planned renovation for the dentistry area. In the LAH, an ophthalmology service has been added and renovations have been made to allow for round rooms for the Radiology and Ambulatory services, and plans are being made to improve the flooring.
Finally, the VMTH is focusing on innovation through the implementation of the client-communication application EASE, an online bill-paying service, and is collaborating with capstone students in the College of Engineering to develop an efficiency map that will enable the VMTH to evaluate their processes
“These students produced flow charts that were about 7 feet tall,” Connell said. “It’s shocking how detailed the processes are.
“When you see it like that, when you actually see it and it’s mapped out and it’s visual, it’s really stunning what we do on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “I just have real respect for everyone that’s working in those areas because, everybody has very complicated jobs to do.”
The next step with the engineering collaboration is that this semester, a new group of students will take last semester’s information and help the hospital to create better processes for several of the mapped areas.
Looking to the future, Connell reviewed some of the innovative procedures being developed on the clinical side of the hospitals, as well as the opportunities presented by digital medicine technologies that are being explored by the VMTH. Perhaps the biggest item on the VMTH’s agenda for future exploration is the building of a new teaching hospital.
“We’ve been working closely with Development on fundraising initiatives to try to generate funds to do that,” Connell said. “I think if we’re going to build a new teaching hospital, we really ought to be building for the future and not just expanding the space and adding new bells and whistles and doing the same thing that we’re doing today. If we’re going to do this, we need to be purposeful about it, and it needs to have an impact.
“We’ve got a lot of great opportunities ahead of us,” he said. “There are a lot of things we’re uncertain about, but we’re still moving forward. We’re excited about that.”
