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Trends preview: Family-centered practice is the future of vet med

The 2024 AAHA Community Care Guidelines are here! Now it’s time to get familiar with family-centered care—and the role it plays in system-level community care.

Published Nov 6, 2024

By Kristen Green Seymour

The 2024 AAHA Community Care Guidelines for Small Animal Practice shine a light on family-centered care, which not only helps the pets and people you serve, but also your team—and the community at large.

Today, the dominant practice model in veterinary medicine requires out-of-pocket payment for services, which limits care access to those clients who can afford it. And if you’re reading this, chances are pretty darn good that you’ve run into a situation where a client wants to do what’s best for their beloved pet, but simply doesn’t have the means to cover the cost.

That scenario doesn’t only impact the patient and client, but the veterinary team, too. Not being able to provide care due to a client’s financial situation puts veterinary practitioners at odds with their oath and mission, which often leads to moral distress.

Too often, veterinary teams feel they’re left with limited options, like discounting services (which is not always a sustainable business practice) or suggesting the owner relinquish the pet to someone in the practice who can afford the care (which is also unsustainable, in addition to being heartbreaking).

Time for a change

Today, about two-thirds of American households include pets, and it’s increasingly common for the people in those homes to consider their pets family. At the same time, as even more people are seeking healthcare for their pets, the veterinary profession is losing people at an unsustainable rate.

It’s clear that change is needed in order to increase access to care. That’s why family-centered healthcare, as outlined in the Community Care Guidelines, is the future of vet med.

After all, veterinary teams want to help every pet that comes through their practice doors, but factors beyond their control too often get in the way. Collaborating with nonprofits and the community beyond the practice walls provides a path to expanded offerings—without negative impacts to the business, the team, or the patient and client.

What is family-centered care?

Practicing family-centered care requires a major shift—one that centers the patient and their family in the approach to care, rather than the veterinarian and team. By recognizing the barriers to care clients may face, it becomes possible to work with them to mitigate those barriers, which ultimately benefits pets, people, and even the planet.

Although the Community Care Guidelines have only recently been released, it’s important to note that family-centered care isn’t a new concept. It came about in human healthcare after World War II as a way to keep hospitalized children with their families, and gained wider and more defined reach in the 1980s.

According to the National Resource Center for Family Centered Practice at the University of Iowa School of Social Work, key components of family-centered practice (in human healthcare) include:

Engaging with family members to understand their lives, goals, strengths, and challenges and developing a relationship between family and practitioner.
Working with the family to set goals, strengthen capacity, and make decisions.
Providing individualized, culturally responsive, and evidence-based interventions for each family.
Family-centered practice spans the community-based services continuum and is not restricted to a specific service or model.

At its core, family-centered practice takes a holistic, nonjudgmental view of the family’s situation to determine the best plan of care for a child and their family. Everything from finances to cultural beliefs to access to other services within the community is considered. Professionals practicing family-centered care prioritize solutions that keep children with their families, preventing out-of-home placements whenever there is a safe option to do so.

Defining family-centered veterinary practice

The Community Care Guidelines cite family-centered care as a core component (along with recognizing the urgency of the issue and utilizing collaboration for increasing access to veterinary care) of community care, noting that:

Family-centered veterinary practitioners recognize the fact that pet caregivers exist across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, and these practitioners promote health equity by taking the family’s needs (financial and otherwise) into account.
Family-centered practice redefines the “gold standard” as high-quality, system-level care that ensures all caregivers can access care, regardless of barriers.
Unlike the traditional approach to veterinary medicine, in which the focus is on disease management (sometimes in isolation from the context of the family), family-centered practice considers the family’s circumstances and goals.

Put into action, a family-centered approach:

Prioritizes keeping pets with their families.
Offers multiple payment options, knowing that cost is the most significant barrier to care.
Implements a spectrum-of-care approach, including using the range of available diagnostics and treatments to provide care the family can access, recognizing when early referrals might be beneficial, and utilizing technicians and other staff.

Helping people, pets, and planet

The benefits of this approach to the family go without saying, and to many, the benefit to the veterinary team through reduction of moral distress may also be obvious.

The positives continue, because it also benefits the community, which does not have to foot the bill to house the pet in a shelter. This, in turn, leaves more spots in shelters open for the pets who are still seeking a loving family.

And that’s not all—there’s the One Health aspect, too.

“Ensuring access to veterinary care is about more than compassion, as important as that is,” said Michael Blackwell, DVM, MPH, director of the Program for Pet Health Equity at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “When families don’t receive veterinary care, zoonotic disease threats are not prevented and controlled, presenting risks to the family and their community. There are numerous infectious and parasitic diseases that pets can pass on to their family, with children often at higher risk due to their interactions with the pet and environment.”

In fact, this benefit to the One Health mission is part of what makes it so important to implement a family-centered approach sooner rather than later.

“Some zoonotic diseases are increasing in frequency, due in part, to climate change. When these are not prevented and controlled, the family and community are at a higher risk of being affected, resulting in higher healthcare costs for the family and those who help fund their medical care, e.g., human health insurance companies and taxpayers,” Blackwell said. “Family-centric veterinary care is the frontline defense from preventable diseases that affect the family.”

There are countless reasons to be excited about the future of veterinary medicine, and a shift toward family-centered care—along with the implementation of system-level community care—is at the top of the list. You can read more about family-centered care as the future of vet med in your December Trends, and dive into the resources below in the meantime.