Consultations are complex interactions and an effective exchange is important for building the veterinarian-client-patient relationships necessary to deliver optimal care.  However, what makes a successful consultation has yet to be fully defined. A systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature, performed in 2016, has identified publications measuring aspects of success in small animal consultations (L Corah, under peer-review) and subsequent focus groups have identified additional domains associated with consultation success (L Corah, unpublished data). The aim of this study is to use the identified domains of success to produce a measurement tool to assess consultations.

The in-consultation measurement tool has been designed using several, mostly published, tools to gather basic information about a consultation (Robinson et al., 2015), categorise communication (Discourse analysis, (Mishler, 1984)) and assess the decision-making processes (OPTION 5, (Dillon et al., 2016)).  In addition, the tool contains measurements of time including length of the consult and client waiting time.  To assess the validity of the tool, a collection of video-recorded veterinary consultations will be analysed and correlated to post consultation assessments of veterinarian satisfaction (Shaw et al., 2012), client satisfaction (Coe et al., 2010) client adherence with oral medication and client perception of veterinarian ethos/credibility (McCroskey and Teven, 1999). This poster will present findings from a pilot of novel consult scoring method and discuss plans to use the tool in a much larger validation study small animal consultations in the United Kingdom. 



Authors:
*CORAH, L1, DEAN, RS2, COBB, K1, MOSSOP, L1 and COE, JB3
1. School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, United Kingdom;
2. Centre for Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, United Kingdom;
3. Department of Population Medicine, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada