Polluting patient care

What's all this about? Check out more information on toxic teams here. When it comes down to it, what is most important when working in a veterinary practice? Your patients. Their owners bring them to you for the care they need to grow up happy and healthy. But what happens when you work in a toxic environment? Can you even identify what makes a toxic team? And what would you change if you knew that all the tension, conflict, yelling and anger was actually harming your patients? 

But let's get to the real-world experience of it all, via the 2017 dvm360 Toxic Team Survey*. 

When we asked how often and in what ways, the frequency varied from rarely to every day(!), and we found some common themes ...

Neglect:"Staff members aren't as focused on clients and patients as they should be because they were worrying about conflicts"

Mistakes: "Missing lab samples, giving incorrect treatments."

Taking frustrations out on the patients: "Saw a dog jabbed with a needle out of a coworker's frustration, when normally the shot would have been given more carefully, calmly and with compassion."

Then we asked some really tough questions, like ... "Has a toxic environment you've experienced ever caused harm or suffering to a patient?"

Click to the next page to see the results.

*The 2017 dvm360 Toxic Teams Survey was sent to subscribers of dvm360, Vetted and Firstline. The survey generated 776 responses, creating a margin of error of about 4 percentage points.