Hello everyone! My name is Monica, I'm a CVT, and I'm the veterinary intake coordinator at ACCT Philly, the only open intake shelter serving Philadelphia. We take in a massive number of animals every week, and are contractually obligated to accept any animals that are brought in. We're working with a very small budget and a decrepit hulk of a building that was never designed for this sort of work and is mostly an inefficient maze of hallways and rooms that we can't really modify much since it belongs to the city.
The challenge I am working on solving is the massive bottleneck in our dog intake process. Currently, what happens with dogs is: They come in to the Intake lobby, and are checked in by the staff there. Then, they have to wait for an animal care attendant (ACA) to come up, get the dog, and take it to the medical dog intake room, where the nurse assigned to intake exams for the day does an initial exam and gives vaccines, scans for a chip, etc. Then the animal is moved to the kennels. Our kennels are essentially a warehouse with housing for around 100 dogs, and a smaller room with 10 kennels for small dogs. As things work right now, we intake one dog at a time, and if there's a high rate of intake that day, we get a massive backup of dogs in the intake lobby waiting to go back. Anything that comes in after the medical team leaves for the day gets put in the kennels and has to wait until the next morning, and is easily missed because our kennel cards are terrible (we use Shelterluv as our management system, and it really sucks). Because there's only 1 ACA assigned to walk dogs back for the intake process, and only a small, narrow room for dog intake, the whole process is painfully slow, and the intake nurse is under a lot of pressure to move faster, and a lot of things get missed. We also only have 2 CVTs on staff (including me), limited coverage with doctors, and very few other staff have any veterinary medicine experience outside of the shelter because we can't compete with vet hospital pay.
I'm trying to figure out a way to change the process so we can get the dogs in and dealt with faster and get them up for adoption. What sort of procedure does your open intake high volume shelter use?
#AdmissionsandIntake(includingIntake-to-placement)------------------------------
Monica Freiberg
Veterinary Intake Coordinator
ACCT Philly
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