The term “Capacity for Care” gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean and can it even be useful in the face of the seemingly relentless onslaught of large dogs shelters are facing today?

In this practical webinar, Dr. Kate Hurley from the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program will cover the specifics of how to calculate the right target number to maximize life-saving while optimizing animal health and welfare – and staff sanity. Hurley will demonstrate how any shelter can use the Koret Shelter Medicine Program’s free online C4C calculator to estimate how many animals need to be housed at any one time, based on expected monthly intake and target length of stay. Then we will dive into a practical example of how this number was calculated and aligned with housing capacity at the South L.A. branch of Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS), part of one of the largest and most challenging shelter systems in the United States.

Annette Ramirez, Interim General Manager from LAAS, along with members of her team, will share their agency’s experience of going from severe crowding to attaining, and more importantly maintaining, a population pretty close to their Capacity for Care. A key to success was moving from long standing policies driving a reactive decision making process to a proactive framework that can identify dogs at risk before they deteriorate severely or the population swells beyond staff’s ability to provide care. And they did it even in the face of rising intake and without increasing the euthanasia rate! It’s a pretty inspiring example and we hope it will be a useful one for many shelters facing similar challenges.

Presenters:

Dr. Kate Hurley from UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program
Annette Ramirez, Garens Loyd, Sarah Quintanilla from Los Angeles Animal Services

WEBSITE LINK: https://www.calanimals.org/on