Here I am, yet again.
I just started working at an AAHA accredited clinic. I'm starting to learn that the AAHA accreditation is a load of crap. I am an experienced credentialed technician and I was hired on to do their nurse appointments and to help train the assistants in between and take care of hospitalized patients. Day 1 was good. Much lower stress than I've been dealing with, decent flow to follow, etc. Day 2 is where the red flags started popping up. I overheard them start talking about training one of the newer assistants to monitor anesthesia. This person has zero vetmed background and hasn't even worked for this clinic for 90 days (tbh, I'm not sure how long she's been here, it may not have even been a month yet- yesterday was apparently her first day doing appointments solo). Tell me why tf they have made it clear that I am not going to be doing sx/anesthesia there, my job is nurse appointments, but that they are training an incredibly green assistant on anesthesia???? I understand what I was hired for and ya know, good for me, it's low stress for the most part. But why tf am I doing entire mornings of nail trims and anal glands and someone literally off the street is being "trained" in anesthesia monitoring??? I assumed that they had a fully trained sx/anesthesia team and that's why they didn't want/need me there. Low key, I'm burnt out and decided to have the mindset of "not my circus" for now. Well, yesterday red flag 2 popped up. They asked me if I had ever boxed a cat down. Honestly, it's been like, 16 years since I did that and I now know so much better and I know how bad that is. I didn't feel comfortable doing that at all but the way it was explained, the dr made it out to seem like this was an incredibly rare circumstance. I ended up making myself busy and not being involved. I figured it wouldn't come up again because this was an AAHA practice, so like why would that be a standard thing here? Boy was I confused about the AAHA standards. I was looking at my schedule for next week and I have a drop off scheduled with giant alerts that this cat can only be gassed down and is routinely sedated this way. From looking at the history, I couldn't find any medical indication that would indicate that iso was the safest sedation, just that they couldn't sedate it with injectables because it couldn't be handled (how can you get a cat in a box, but you cant pop it through the carrier with a needle?? Or grab a thick towel and gloves and squish it down to just injectables in?). One of the other doctors mentioned to me that boxing cats down is how they handle fractious cats. So I'm guessing this isn't quite a rare occurrence for them. Im disappointed because the case yesterday the Dr tried to act like this was super rare and not the standard they held themselves to, etc. And obviously our definitions of rare aren't the same.
How tf do AAHA hospitals work like this? Is it really appropriate for them to have someone off the street with minimal training monitoring anesthesia and to be boxing cats down?? I really don't know how to approach this. I guess I can talk to them about boxing the cats down next week, but I cant imagine these people just deciding to try injectables on this cat that they've been gassing down routinely for years because the new tech doesn't like it. Also, not to mention that this cat has probably been handled so poorly in the past and is so used to being gassed down that I have no doubt it will be extremely difficult to get injectables into.
At this point, I'm looking at non-clinical vetmed jobs and I plan to spend the weekend applying to them. Wish me luck because I was burnt out before I started this clinic and now I'm burnt out and disappointed in our field.