Have you been wondering how you can impose order upon chaos in your
animal shelter or rescue organization? Do you wish you could find a way to do more surgeries or give more vaccines to the animals in your care? Ever wonder why your new hires just don't seem to "get it?"

Dr. Michael Moyer, former director of the Shelter Animal
Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary
Medicine and president and board member of the American Animal
Hospital Association, knows just what you need: SOPs, or standard operating procedures.

Think that sounds kind of… boring? Not at all. Check out this excerpt from his talk "Fighting SNAFUs with SOPs":

How many shelters hire people and because they're short staffed, they hire the first person that can fog a mirror? They assign that hire to somebody's who already over-worked, over-burdened, not particularly inclined to train somebody, and they say, "Train this person to do X," and the training consists of "Here's X." And that's their on-the-job training.

Turnover is often very high in shelters so training is critical, particularly when animals' lives depend on how well you do really simple tasks. Cleaning a cage is really simple once you know how to clean a cage. Using the right products, the right materials, knowing how to dilute them, having the right supplies in the right place so you can dilute them properly.

These things seem really straight forward, but it's all part of the standard operating procedure, and the introduction to those materials is made much, much easier by having them and having them handy, having them not in the chief operating officer's desk or sitting up there far away from where the action takes place, but having them near the place where the task is executed.

To watch the full video, click here. You can also view the following shorter segments from the talk:

1 – SOPs: Benefits, How to Create Them, How to Use Them and Revise Them (33:50)
2 – Errors, Adverse Events, Bad Outcomes Avoided with Good SOPs and Situational Awareness (4:13)
3 – Lessons Learned From a Formula One Pit Crew (5:47)