Auditing clinical outcomes and customer experience for TPLO surgery in dogs

Hello there, it’s Ross Allan here from the Roundhouse Vet Hospital, Roundhouse Referrals and Pets & Vets, all of which is based up here in Glasgow. I’m going to talk a little bit about our RCVS Knowledge Award for 2025, which was for our project TPLO+, which is a QI project we’ve been running in our clinic for a number of years now.

In fact, our 2025 award is our fifth consecutive highly commended award this year in the in-practice section of the 2025 awards.

This project has been based upon our TPLO surgeries, both in terms of their clinical outcome, but also a customer experience. These being two things that we felt were important to assess in terms of building up our hospital and our services and providing the evidence to help our own career development and as a team help us grow and develop. We want to be the best in our world.

We want to know that we are providing great care and we want to help identify areas in which we could develop and grow and progress. So this has really been an important project to enable us to do that.

Another thing is that this isn’t only about the clinical care. This is about the entire patient journey. So that’s involving everything from the initial contact by the referring practice or client all the way through to the final sign off. So it’s important that we’ve had a project that has actually helped us fully improve and assess the whole breadth of that care, not only the clinical procedure itself.

The means in which we’ve assessed and performed our project is based upon a questionnaire which is sent to owners a minimum of six months following their pet’s surgery. The questionnaire that’s sent has two elements, clinical outcome and also customer experience.

The clinical outcome element of the questionnaire is based upon a previous peer-reviewed publication. The customer experience section is based upon our own questionnaire that we wanted to develop. It’s also been the same questionnaire we’ve used in each of these annual reports. Now we’ve been highly committed for five years in a row. So what that’s meant is that we’ve been able to self benchmark to previous and prior reports and results, which has been really important.

Our award for 2025 is based on our 2024 results. There was a total of 63 questionnaires returned, a response rate of 56%.

What we wanted to focus on throughout 2024 was about the patient journey and the client journey. So namely to do with improving owner’s awareness of the post-op rehabilitation plan. Also about the ease of making the referral appointment and then feeling supported through that. As with every busy practice, there’s been challenges, changes and things we’ve had to adapt to throughout the year. But we did want to actually look at that first element of the patient journey and seek to improve that and the various touch points, so that’s what our focus was in 2024. So in terms of results, what we’ve got is a net promoter score that in 2025, the report, has risen from 79 the previous year to 97. So a net promoter score of 97, which is excellent. It’s well within the upper quartile for professional services.

In terms of the ease of making an appointment, the ease of making an appointment has risen from 74% to 82% for very easy. So again, that’s a notable improvement. Satisfaction with continuity of care has also risen. And an important thing that we wanted to work on was the plan for managing your dog’s recovery being adequately explained to you pre-op. So that has also risen, that’s now up at 100%.

Over the years, an important thing we’ve wanted to keep on monitoring is whether or not clients would wish to have TPLO surgery performed again should they have their pet or their friend’s pet have a similar injury. And this year, I’m glad to say that once more, we did have 100 % of owners who returned the questionnaire saying that they would choose to have the surgery performed by us in a similar scenario. So that’s a really powerful message personally and for the whole of the team that I’m very fortunate to work with.

So our QI project has been something I’m proud to take part in, something the team also are enthusiastic about and feel really important in terms of who we are, our culture and why we truly can say and seek and continue to seek to be the very best in our world.