Disaster preparedness in veterinary practice

With natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, and others impacting parts of the United States, clients and clinics need to be prepared for a disaster to strike in their area, but how can they prepare?

During an interview with dvm360, Link Welborn, DVM, DABVP, chief veterinary officer, Covetrus, shared his insights from 40 years of experience as well as a practice owner of 8 AAHA-accredited practices on how to best prepare your teams and clients for a natural disaster before it strikes.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity

Link Welborn, DVM, DABVP: I think one of the biggest challenges is trying to figure out where best to apply the opportunity to be of service. It obviously, there's a lot of sort of chaos and confusion associated with any natural disaster, and in at least in the case of some of them, they're, you know, it's an ongoing challenge, like, for instance, with wildfires, whereas a hurricane may move on to a different area, but wildfires can continue to be a problem in a given area. So often, it's challenging to try and figure out, well, you know, I want to help, but how can I help? What's the best mechanism to be able to be of use?

I think that the best resources for most in most cases, is to rely on the State Veterinary Medical Association. Every state has a Veterinary Medical Association (VMA). They typically work closely with the [American Veterinary Medical Association] that has a disaster response team, and often the state VMA is in a position to be able to know, you know, where resources are needed, and help channel those resources most appropriately

I think one of the most important things is indeed that preparation, particularly for pet owners, because most pet owners don't think about what they need to do until, frankly the disaster is upon them. I obviously live in hurricane country, so we see this year after year and so what we try to do is make sure that pets are microchipped first of all, because if a pet does wind up being separated from their family, the likelihood of that pet being returned to the family is enhanced exponentially if they've got a microchip. If they're not microchipped, it's much more challenging to be able to get that pet back to their owner. And we certainly, we've certainly seen that over and over again, so that's probably the number one preparation that we would encourage.