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Preface

This book was designed to provide a valuable resource for all things related to pet‐specific care, from prevention, to early detection, to evidence‐based treatment, guidelines, and facilitated compliance. It is an appropriate source of information to foster consensus building and a team approach to delivering excellent healthcare to animals.

The concept of pet‐specific care is relatively new in veterinary medicine (while the equivalent “personalized medicine” is now considered de rigueur in human medicine) and involves selecting appropriate services for pet and owner, based on both subjective and objective criteria, including breed predisposition, age, level of care requested by owner, risk assessment, appropriate guidelines, financial considerations, and many more aspects. While much of veterinary medicine has been reactive in the past, waiting for pets to develop problems before veterinary teams got involved, pet‐specific care is more proactive, focuses on keeping pets healthy, and considers approaches that span a lifetime rather than from one veterinary visit to the next. It also involves managing pets in a truly team‐based fashion, so throughout the book emphasis is given to the roles of team members in delivering excellent healthcare, communication, and client service. In addition to specific topics covered within the book, there is also a rich collection of appendices that provide additional resources, abbreviations, glossary, and breed tables of heritable conditions organized by canine and feline breeds, conditions, and breed attributes.

Whether you want to know how to provide genetic testing and counseling in practice, find out more about guidelines and standards of care, or the meaning of the term “incremental care” as it applies to healthcare options for clients who couldn't otherwise afford services, you'll find it within the pages of this book.

The intention is to provide as much information as is available that pertains to pet‐specific care for both dogs and cats, and that can be somewhat challenging because there tend to be more resources in the veterinary literature on dogs than cats. That does not detract from the importance of cats and their owners, but recognizes that at this time there are more guidelines, genetic tests, and conditions recognized with a breed predisposition in dogs versus cats. Still, every effort has been made to include as many feline resources as possible, including topics primarily or exclusively dedicated to cats. This isn't just a nod to practices dedicated to cats. In many countries, the majority of pets are cats, and yet cats often represent a much smaller percentage of office appointments and often significantly less hospital revenue. Thus, improving pet‐specific care for cats and their owners also represents a major opportunity for veterinary practices. Most of the content of this book applies equally to cats as to dogs, and there are additional cat‐specific topics in the book as well. It is a sincere hope that there will be even more feline resources available in future editions as the profession develops more of such content because everyone (practices, pet owners, and cats themselves) will benefit from such developments.

The veterinary marketplace has changed dramatically from only a few decades ago. Pets are considered as family members, more so than at any time in the past, and it is imperative to recognize the human–animal bond in all of our efforts. Specialization within the profession has become more commonplace and the creation of specialty and referral hospitals has been robust on a global basis. Partially as a result of this, we also have more published guidelines for veterinary care than were available previously and many are referenced within the pages of this book. Corporate practices are also coming into their own, as are retail‐anchored practices, and we are also witnessing the role this plays in delivering a more market‐driven approach to healthcare. It is also important to recognize the evolution of the veterinary healthcare team and the critical role each healthcare team member provides in the delivery of excellent healthcare, and consistent healthcare.

Yes, things are changing, and change is often difficult to assimilate, especially within the veterinary profession. Veterinary practice often stood as an anachronism, an attempt to hold back the escalation in healthcare costs as pertains to animals. There was a belief that these costs needed to be kept artificially low, because pet owners would be unwilling to pay those costs for the sake of an animal. Yet, study after study has shown that this is not the case and owners do understand the high cost of healthcare and are often receptive to such realistic costs … as long as they see the “value” in those expenditures and reasonable expectations have been established for them by veterinary teams. That being said, it is also important to realize that not all clients can necessarily afford the care they would otherwise wish to select, and there are still ways to deliver reasonable and acceptable care without sacrificing quality. Thus, in this book there are also several topics that deal with this challenging subject.

The profession is indeed changing, and clients have changed, and the services available for pets have changed, but primary care veterinary practices are still very much as they have been in the past, and face many challenges ahead. It is the goal of this book to provide veterinary practices and teams with the information necessary to compete effectively in the marketplace and to deliver exceptional pet‐specific healthcare in a truly team‐based fashion.

Compiling all this information in one volume was an immense task, and I am eternally grateful to my gifted colleagues who contributed to this incredible resource. It wasn't that long ago that the delivery of healthcare was entirely veterinarian focused, and pet‐specific care was a self‐taught discipline based on personal experience, and often by trial and error. That has changed, and I am very proud to be involved in a project, along with the many authors of this book, that helps deliver this much‐needed resource for veterinary healthcare teams.

Lowell Ackerman, DVM, DACVD, MBA, MPA, CVA, MRCVS