Thriving together: Empowering our veterinary technicians

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Happy National Veterinary Technician Week! We are excited to welcome Kelly Cairns, DVM, MS, DACVIM (SAIM), to the podcast this week to discuss how incredible veterinary technicians are, and the initiatives Thrive Pet Healthcare has to support and lift up their technicians.

Through the episode, Cairns and host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, discuss ways that veterinary practices can honor veterinary teams, the work Thrive does with the Penn Foster Sponsorship Program, and Cairns gives a special shoutout to veterinary technicians who are close to her heart.

Below is a partial transcript. Listen to the full podcast for more.

Kelly Cairns, DVM, MS, DACVIM (SAIM): It gets back to supporting our technicians to thrive for life is what we say about everybody, right? Meet you where you're at, figure out what you want in your professional career, in your journey at this moment, and then give you tools, resources, skills, and support to get wherever it is you want to go in your journey, recognizing that's fluid [and] it's not a one-size-fits-all approach.

So for technicians, we all know, I mean, you indicated, and I'm in the same boat, we worked a long time as a noncredentialed technician before we went to vet school. There's so many superhumans in our profession, that train on the job and stay on the job. For whatever the reason is: lack of resource, lack of finances, lack of time, lack of support, they've never had the opportunity to earn their credentials, but they desire to do that. This could be a new assistant that's just joined the field or truly we all know, those superhuman seasoned technicians that could do it better than anybody. They've been in it 20 years, and they still desire to obtain those credentials as part of their personal roadmap.