How Many Clients Can Vets Handle Daily?

Vets can expect the number of clients they see in a day to vary based on a range of factors. These include experience, staffing, the type of practice they operate, and  efficiency. A well-organized practice with adequate support staff, streamlined workflows, and appropriately automated tasks will naturally be able to take on significantly more clients than a chaotic operation. Relatedly, a practice that specializes in check-ups and sick visits will be able to serve more clients than one performing technically involved surgical procedures. As a rule of thumb, veterinary practices should strive for a middle ground between being fully scheduled without overburdening their staff.

What Is a Typical Day as a Veterinarian?

Being a vet demands versatility. A typical day in the life of a vet involves shuttling between multiple tasks: paperwork, patient follow-up, monitoring prescriptions, and patient care. If vets have surgeries scheduled, those patients typically arrive in the morning. This gives the vet time to review their medical records and perform routine pre-surgery bloodwork to ensure their patients are healthy enough to undergo the upcoming procedure. Otherwise, a vet will most often spend their morning on routine patient care–performing physical exams and lab work as well as taking the time to lay out a treatment plan for owners. Later on in the day vets attend to administrative paperwork, patient and prescription follow-up, and returning emails.

What’s the Average Appointment Load for Vets?

Averages vary, but most vets take between 15 and 30 appointments daily. Naturally, this number varies depending on the type of practice. An emergency practice dealing with more variables will work slower than a more routine general practice. Other variables that will affect a vet’s appointment load include the number of support staff and scheduling practices. Some vets place a high value on dedicating time to each patient, whereas others may value the efficiency of short appointments. 

How Many Clients Should a Veterinarian Have?

Most vet practices consider 1,000 active clients a benchmark to shoot for. Again, this number will vary depending on location, type of practice, and other factors. But a client base of roughly 1,000, each of whom visits at least once a year, will ensure financial sustainability.

What Is a Sustainable Number of Clients to See Daily?

Somewhere in the range of 15-30 is considered a sustainable daily number of clients for most vets. This will keep vets busy moving from client to client but not over-stressed or excessively booked. Keep in mind: what’s sustainable will vary with the type of appointment. A vet performing 3-4 surgeries a day may only be able to see a handful of clients for routine appointments. With no surgeries, a vet may be able to handle as many as 30 appointments in a day.

What Are Signs Vets Are Seeing Too Many Clients? 

Vets know best how many clients they can see. Vet practices should encourage open communication between practitioners and management, especially if a vet’s client load becomes too much. When overscheduling becomes a problem, frequent signs include extended wait times for patients, less time for practitioners to empathetically engage with pet owners, and poor client feedback. Vets should have a full schedule that also allows for reasonable breaks and downtime.

How Can Vets Manage the Workload?

Overscheduling has become a problem for a number of veterinary practices. They may be looking to expand their client base or simply meet a spike in demand. Whatever the case, the burden of overbooking falls on vets. An overloaded schedule doesn’t just affect efficiency—it compromises care. Overworked vets are at higher risk for decision fatigue, misdiagnoses, and burnout, while pet owners may feel they’re receiving rushed, impersonal service.

Here are three ways vets can manage a heavy workload without letting the quality of their care suffer.

Provide handouts. 

When a pet owner comes in, they’re not likely to remember everything you explain to them. A good way you can alleviate having to repeat yourself or respond to extensive follow-up questions, which a heavy workload doesn’t typically allow for, is to provide handouts to clients. These handouts should be clear, easy to understand, and to the point. By reinforcing the important information related to diagnosis or prescriptions they’ll save you the trouble of having to repeat yourself at the cost of valuable time.

Automate Routine Client Communication. 

An important part of client retention is consistent communication. But even in adequately staffed offices, manual patient reminders are not a good use of time or labor. To get around this, automate basic client communications like pre-appointment confirmations. You can do this through veterinary software with a wide set of functions or more task-specific tools.

Invest in Staff Training. 

It’s important that staff can rely on an established set of practices for each role in the office. If one team member is out, having a standardized set of procedures allows others to fill in without a lapse in the flow of work. 

In addition, managers should make a point to provide appropriate training with any kind of change in workflows. For example, when incorporating new veterinary software into your operations, allow dedicated time for staff to learn and familiarize themselves with the new program and how it works in your practice. 

What Tools Can Help Vets Manage Appointment Volume? 

Vets are employing software tools to handle time-consuming administrative tasks more and more. This can make a painstaking manual process a semi or fully automated background concern. By making use of Practice Information Management Systems (PIMS) vets can manage appointments and other administrative tasks digitally and alleviate the mess of manual bookkeeping. Additionally, PIMS options like NectarVet can facilitate integrations with diagnostic labs that connect vets to modern diagnostic tools. NectarVet provides a highly navigable client portal, seamless software integrations, and access to AI imaging and diagnostic tools. 

Next Steps

Struggling to balance patient volume and quality care? NectarVet’s all-in-one software automates scheduling, client communication, and diagnostic integration—so you can focus on what matters most, get started here.

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