Technician care for acute kidney injury

Lucy Sumners, RVT, VTS(ECC), a lead veterinary technician specialist at the University of Florida Small Animal Hospital in Gainesville, presented an education session on acute kidney injury management at the 2024 Southwest Veterinary Symposium in Fort Worth, Texas. In an interview with dvm360®, she discussed the veterinary technician’s role in caring for patients with acute kidney injury.

The following is a transcript of the video:

Lucy Sumbers, RVT, VTS (ECC): My goal with this talk is also to empower technicians, kind of wherever they are at it doesn't have to be emergency. They can be in specialty or they can be in general practice, because these patients are going to be seen anywhere at some point in their kind of range as they go through and so the nursing care that I wanted to kind of empower them with this is early recognition. So for patients that come in that have a little bit of elevation in their kidney values. Where is it coming from? Do we have a concurrent heart disease? Is there a heat stress event? Is there an infectious process?

And then, if therapies are started at your clinic, what can you do to monitor how well your therapies are working? So the easiest way, and what people forget, is that you can do body weights on the patients, and it is no extra cost. It is very non invasive, but you can tell just by their body weight and their urine output, if they are in fact, if their kidneys are functioning or if they're even producing urine at the same time.

You don't have to have any fancy equipment just to scale, and so I just wanted to emphasize that you don't need to be at a teaching hospital in order to take care of these patients, but the nursing care that goes into it for these guys is a lot of just kind of comfort. They can be very uncomfortable, very nauseous, painful, because kidney pain is pretty significant. And so the the kind of tender, loving care aspect of nursing care is really important for these guys, making sure they have adequate nutrition, adequate water. We're the ones that are working with them minute to minute, and so we'll see if they're nauseous as we do something, or if they all of a sudden become painful, or if their mentation changes, and we can alert the doctors to those changes and kind of make suggestions as we go through.