Blog

Auditing: How We’re Making Farm Surgery Better

What is an audit? 

A process of collecting data in a specific area of practice. In our case, this is all surgeries performed by our vets. We have been collating information since July 2022. Castrations and disbuds/dehorns were not included. 

How do we collect the data? 

We collect the data on a paper spreadsheet in the vet’s office. 

What is recorded? 

Client and animal details are recorded, as well as type of surgery and outcome. These are crudely recorded as survivability at 1 day, 1 week and 1-month post-surgery. 

Why do we audit? 

Auditing is crucial to understand the real data for our specific practice about the overall success of surgeries on our farms. This means we can compare to benchmarks and discover where we can improve. 

What are the results? 

Well, this is the tricky part. Getting a robust method of recording can be challenging. It can be hard to record all surgeries, but it is especially hard to get the follow up data. Remembering to speak to a farmer 1 month after a surgery to see if it is alive and well is a crux of the system. We need good quality reliable data to be able to draw useful conclusions. Here is some information that has been recorded so far: 

179 surgeries performed, of which 84 were caesarean sections, 67 were LDA corrections. The rest were made up of enucleations, RDA corrections, hernia repairs and one cyst removal. 
Of the 67 LDA corrections, 38 were using our laparoscopic technique, 18 were toggled and 11 were surgically corrected. 
Of recorded data, we have a 89% survival rate of all surgeries to 1 month post operation. 

Preliminary findings show good results for all our surgeries performed at Shepton Vets, especially considering this includes some RDAs which carry a poorer prognosis. It shows us that lots of farms are adopting the laparoscopic correction of LDAs.   

What will we do from here? 

We need to Improve our recording and monitoring of outcomes.   We will start checking all surgeries have been recorded at the end of each month by cross checking the audit against work booked.  We will then continue to gather more data and as we increase our dataset we will be able to report back to you with a more detailed analysis of outcomes.   

 Vet Harry