The shorthand a clinic runs on is a small, learnable vocabulary: abbreviations for what was observed, what was given, how it was given, and where on the body it happened.
This page walks through the charting, medication, anatomy and procedure terms a new veterinary assistant hears in week one — and the rule that outranks every list: each clinic keeps its own approved abbreviations, so theirs is the one that counts.
Charting abbreviations: the shorthand of the medical record
You'll hear the word "charting" before almost anything else on the floor.
It means writing what happened to each patient into the medical record, and it runs on compressed vocabulary — the record is written fast, read aloud constantly, and every word counts.
The visit note itself is the one you'll hear called a SOAP note, and it breaks into four parts: S for subjective (what the owner reports — appetite, vomiting, behavior), O for objective (what is measured and seen — temperature, weight, how the patient looks), A for assessment (what the veterinarian thinks is going on) and P for plan (what happens next — treatments, medications, a recheck).
Around the note, staff compress a patient's status into one-liners.
BAR — bright, alert, responsive — is the good-news line; when a patient is quiet or off, the record says so in the same shorthand style.
NPO — nil per os, nothing by mouth — flags a patient held off food and water, most often ahead of anesthesia.
You'll also hear vitals shorthand like TPR (temperature, pulse, respiration) for the numbers taken at each visit.
A sentence like "take TPRs on the BAR cat in treatment" is one line instead of four, and by the end of week one you'll be hearing it as a single instruction.
The caveat that keeps all of this honest: our research found no profession-wide master list to point to behind these terms.
Clinics use their own approved abbreviation lists, and two hospitals can write the same instruction differently — so the list your team hands you at orientation is the one that counts.
Where you'll actually meet all of this, and under how much supervision, is the story of your first week; this page is the vocabulary that week runs on.
Medication and dosing terms: reading the treatment sheet
The treatment sheet is where abbreviations matter most, because each line compresses a drug, a route, a frequency and a patient into a few characters.
The route is how a drug gets into the body, and the Merck Veterinary Manual's abbreviation list defines these four: IM (intramuscular), IV (intravenous), SC (subcutaneous) and PO (per os — orally).
| Abbreviation | Stands for | In plain words |
|---|---|---|
| IM | intramuscular | into the muscle |
| IV | intravenous | into a vein |
| SC | subcutaneous | under the skin |
| PO | per os (orally) | by mouth |
You may also see that same under-the-skin route written SQ, or hear "sub-Q" said out loud — same meaning, house spelling.
And the os in NPO from the charting section is the same per os: nothing, by mouth.
Frequency has its own shorthand.
The same Merck list uses q to mean "every" in drug doses — so a line reading q12h means every 12 hours.
But your clinic may never write it that way: some practices use Latin-derived shorthand instead, SID for once daily and BID for twice daily, while others write the q-pattern as q24h or q12h.
Two clinics, two approved lists, the same instruction — that split is the clearest example of why published lists are dictionaries and your hospital's list is the rulebook.
Nothing on a treatment sheet is a guessing exercise
Anatomy and direction terms: how the floor describes location
Human medicine describes the body front-to-back; veterinary teams describe it head-to-tail.
The words you'll hear: cranial (toward the head), caudal (toward the tail), dorsal (toward the spine), ventral (toward the belly), lateral (toward the side, away from the middle) and medial (toward the middle).
On the head itself, you'll hear rostral — toward the nose.
These words stack into the instructions you'll follow.
"Left lateral recumbency" means the patient is lying on its left side; sternal means lying on its chest; dorsal recumbency means on its back.
Restraint vocabulary runs on the same set: NAVTA's skills list for veterinary assistant training names standing, sitting, lateral, sternal and dorsal restraint positions — the same direction words, applied to how a patient is held.
You don't need to memorize any of this as a list — the terms attach themselves to real tasks.
The first time someone asks you to hold a leg off for a blood draw, or positions a patient for radiographs, the direction words start mapping onto the animal in front of you, and after a few repeats they're just words.
Common procedures: decoding the day's schedule
The whiteboard or schedule carries its own layer of shorthand.
Two surgeries have a pet-owner name and a medical name at once, and part of the job is translating between them in the same conversation.
A spay is an ovariohysterectomy — sometimes written OVH on the schedule.
A neuter is an orchiectomy.
Around those, pre-surgical and discharge mark the appointments on either side of a procedure, and a dental or prophy (short for prophylaxis) is a professional teeth cleaning.
One pattern here pays off more than any single word: medical terms are built from reusable parts.
The ending -ectomy means surgical removal — it's why the spay's long name ends the way it does, and once you spot the pattern, a schedule word with that ending starts decoding itself.
NAVTA's essential skills list for assistant training groups the work into areas like pharmacy and pharmacology, surgical preparation and assisting, and radiography and ultrasound imaging — the same buckets new schedule vocabulary naturally sorts into as you hear it used.
How to learn veterinary terminology fast
Ask for your clinic's own abbreviation list at orientation.
Wherever the team keeps it — posted by the treatment board, in the training packet, in the record software — that version of every term outranks anything published, and studying it saves you relearning the same word twice.
Then build a deck of your own.
Flashcard apps work fine — Quizlet included — but the cards you write yourself, from the terms you actually fumbled on shift, beat any pre-made set.
Keep a pocket notebook or a phone note: the first time you look a word up, write it down, then say it out loud in context a few times before the week ends.
Group new terms the way the job uses them — charting words together, routes together, direction terms together, schedule words together — instead of alphabetically.
Reading real postings doubles as study.
Open veterinary assistant jobs describe duties in plain language, and matching each duty — monitoring patients, surgical prep, pharmacy tasks — to its vocabulary is exactly the recall the floor demands.
The wider set of vet assistant skills employers screen for, from restraint to client communication, is its own guide; terminology is the layer of vocabulary running underneath all of it.