The vet/nurse team: Critical care patients – optimising their care in general practice

Some of the patients we manage in general practice might require critical care, resulting in our team and ourselves feeling stretched. However managing critical patients can be exceptionally rewarding and stimulating, but we often need to be ahead of the disease predicting complications and potential deterioration. In this session, we will discuss how we can optimise the care of our sicker patients and provide some useful tips and tricks that could help our team maximising the effort to save our pets' lives. We will highlight the importance of communication and hand-over, and discuss how to select the most appropriate diagnostics and monitoring tests, including a discussion of the rule of 20 to make sure nothing has been missed when one might be focused on life-threatening aspects, and decision-making behind optimal treatment strategies for the most critical patients.

• Understand how handover and communication can optimise our patients’ management
• Describe the most common diagnostics we have available in practice and discuss how we can use them optimally
• Describe different level of monitoring and appraise how early recognition is the key to success
• Discuss the concepts behind treatment of the critical patients