Introducing a Service Animal in healthcare is always challenging. Besides the benefits, one must look at all the possible issues with this new endeavour and possible infections. Large Administrations are always reluctant to look at new projects, especially when people on these committees have their agenda.

We all know that working with the public can be sometimes challenging. Not everyone looks at pre-operative care the same way. We all try to prevent infections from occurring and sometimes, even with our best efforts, wound infection occurs. We always have to weigh the pros and cons and make sure the patient is the one who has the best surgical outcome.

We have had a Medical Scent (cortisol) Service Dog in training (SDiT) in our private surgical facilities for over 6 months. With our policy and procedure that was developed after looking at many European hospitals, we have allowed the service dog to go everywhere except the sterile environment and sterilization department for obvious reasons.

We have just finished conducting a review of our activities. Although we have performed over 1200 surgeries, we are happy to report that we have seen no change in our infection rate. There has been no incident in animal issues and no increase in our infection rate in our two sites.

The benefit has been extraordinary. The patient’s outcome has been above our expectations. Some patients were able to be treated in our facility that would normally be booked in hospital ORs due to anxiety or inability to perform IV sedation. Our recovery staff advised us that the patient did very well with the presence of the dog and remained calm with their attention on something else than their surgical procedure. With the presence of the SDiT, the requirement for pain medication was lower.

More studies are required including measuring of cortisol levels in our patients; however, this is an encouraging sign of the positive aspect of these animals without the infection that we are all worried about.