The chronic illness management plan

For veterinary nursing teachers, one of the hardest things to instil in students is an appreciation of the responsibility they have when giving advice to clients (personal experience). This is also a difficult thing to assess. The role of the veterinary nurse to, alongside the veterinarian, assist the client through the diagnosis and subsequent treatment of conditions in their patients, is of significant importance as they are often the ones ‘on the front line’ when it comes to client questions and concerns relating to chronic conditions. The ability to communicate the right advice to the right client at the right time can be challenging. The Chronic Illness Management Plan (Figure 1) was developed to assess the accuracy and quality of advice in training veterinary nurses after careful consideration of many things: the nursing processes and duties of veterinary nurses within a veterinary clinic, a desire to formalise and document the advice given about chronic illness in veterinary practice, which the author had increasingly seen a need for, and the need to meet the criteria of a unit of competency within the Certificate IV Veterinary Nursing qualification. The unit ACMVET409A Provide specific animal care advice is one of the larger units of the Certificate IV Veterinary Nursing qualification (further information about this unit of competency can be found at: http://training.gov.au/Training/Details/ACMVET409A#). This unit assesses the skills and knowledge of training veterinary nurses to give specific animal care advice to owners about a wide range of health issues. The rationale of the Chronic Illness Management Plan or CHIMP is explained in Table 1.