Effect of a visiting peripatetic sonography service on number of ultrasound examinations performed by other veterinary surgeons in a clinic
This is something I’ve long been interested in. A friend of mine, half joking I think, suggested to me that our aim should be to suppress the development of other budding sonographers in the practices which we visit. I tried to defend myself that this is not the case. I strongly believe it’s a win-win. It’s in everybody’s interest to promote the use of ultrasound in all circumstances. We all really enjoy doing as much teaching (and learning) as possible as we go round and I have always been impressed with the enthusiasm of everybody for discussing cases and techniques but the truth is I didn’t have a lot of hard facts on the subject until now.
These figures came unprompted from Dave Ellson at Wildbore Vetstop in Worksop; to whom I’m very grateful. They have a large first opinion and referral practice with a very capable team who, were they not open to new ideas, could easily have felt satisfied back in early 2016 that they were doing perfectly well thank you.
Numbers of charged ultrasound scans performed by practice members. themselves We started visiting as a peripatetic service in August 2016.
….and yet, not only did they find a large number of patients for us to scan as visiting sonographers, they abruptly more than doubled the number they did themselves. As far as I’m aware there were no major confounding changes in personnel or equipment during this period.
