I love the convenience of Amazon. Household stuff, consumables, clothing, decor, you name it. A few clicks and it lands on my porch, delivered by what I can only assume are magical elves. The catch is that all that convenience comes with a fair number of returns, for one reason or another.
My system is simple. I take them to the local Staples and wait in line with my packages, which on any given day runs anywhere from two people deep to fifteen. Usually it moves at a nice steady clip.
Not this day.
The Line That Stopped Moving
I’d clocked the problem before I even reached the counter. The woman ahead of me had a shopping cart, and I was doing that discreet lean, trying to figure out whether it was full of purchases or returns. It was returns. Package after package after package. I counted to twenty before I lost track. Behind me, I could hear the shuffle of people realizing the same thing I had, which was that the line had stopped moving and nobody knew for how long.
My first instinct was to get annoyed. But I’ve been practicing something lately, and that something is patience. It does not come naturally to me, so I take my opportunities where I find them. I reminded myself I had nowhere to be, and I let it go.
What I couldn’t let go of was the thought it kicked loose.
Without a policy limiting how many returns one person can process at a time, everyone behind that cart was quietly absorbing the cost, whether they’d volunteered to or not. Their time, their afternoon, their patience. And the person taking the real heat wasn’t the woman with the cart. It was the Staples employee at the counter, facing a growing sea of sighs, tapping feet, and pointed looks, with absolutely no power to fix the situation, because no one had given him a policy to stand on.
A Policy Is Solid Ground, Not a Wall
That is what a missing policy does. It transfers the burden onto whoever is closest and least able to refuse it.
If you’ve ever hesitated to put a policy in place at your hospital because it felt too strict, I’d ask you to turn it around. A good policy isn’t a wall you build to keep people out. It’s solid ground for your team to stand on. It protects the staff member at the front desk who otherwise has to absorb a client’s frustration with no tools and no backup. It protects the clients who do everything right from carrying the weight of the ones who don’t. And it protects your relationship with everyone, because clear expectations run in both directions. When clients know what you expect of them, they know what they can expect from you.
The key word is clear. A policy that lives in someone’s head, or shows up as a surprise at checkout, isn’t really a policy at all. Everyone involved has to know the rule before the moment it matters.
What a No-Show Policy Taught Me
Let me give you the example that made me a believer. At one of my hospitals, surgery was in high demand and our slots were genuinely coveted. We also had a no-show problem, and when a client didn’t show for a surgical appointment, it wasn’t a small thing. It robbed another pet of a slot they would have gladly taken, and it cost the hospital missed revenue for a day we had set aside and couldn’t fill on short notice. On top of that, our drop-off instructions were vague. Clients were simply told to bring their pet in before 9 a.m., which in practice meant the team spent the early morning on standby, never quite able to start their day because a pet might come through the door, or might not.
So we put a policy in place with two parts to it. The first was a no-show fee if the appointment wasn’t cancelled within 48 hours. The second was an assigned drop-off time for every client rather than that open-ended window before 9. Clients were told about the policy when they booked and reminded again at both reminder calls, so nothing about it ever came as a surprise. It worked, and the surgical no-shows essentially disappeared.
The part I didn’t fully appreciate until afterward was that the policy didn’t just protect the schedule, it protected the team. They stopped spending their mornings in limbo, wondering whether a given client would materialize and dreading the disruption of stopping mid-task to check in a pet who arrived whenever it suited them. Assigned times meant the day finally had a shape they could count on.
And the team understood the stakes better than anyone, because a no-show cost the hospital money and it could cost them hours when the surgery board ran thin. For the newer team members, a cancelled procedure could mean a lost chance to learn, especially when it was an unusual case they might not see again for months. The policy wasn’t us versus the clients. It was us protecting something everyone had a stake in.
So here’s my ask. Look at where the friction lives in your practice. What’s frustrating you, your team, or your clients right now? Sit with it for a minute, then ask whether the problem is really the people, or the absence of a rule that would have protected all of them from the situation in the first place.
More often than you’d think, the kindest thing you can do is write the policy.
— Dr. V
The Gray Oak Journal
Dr. V is a veterinarian with over twenty years of clinical and operational leadership experience. She has owned and operated several veterinary hospitals, weathered many shifts in the industry, and served on advisory councils. She writes The Gray Oak Journal at grayoakjournal.com.