Tasha McNerney spotlights proactive pain prevention in pets

A new Blunt Dissection episode featuring Tasha McNerney, titled “Preventing Pain in Pets (& People!),” puts veterinary pain prevention back on the agenda at a time when the profession is still working to turn pain-management guidelines into routine practice. The episode arrives alongside ongoing anesthesia-focused education across the industry, including Patterson Veterinary’s All Things Veterinary content featuring Darci Palmer, another well-known technician specialist in anesthesia and analgesia. (veterinaryanesthesianerds.com)

McNerney’s profile helps explain why the conversation carries weight. She is a Certified Veterinary Technician, a Veterinary Technician Specialist in anesthesia and analgesia, a Certified Veterinary Pain Practitioner, founder of Veterinary Anesthesia Nerds, and a board member of the International Veterinary Academy of Pain Management. Her organization says she also helped drive the profession’s now widely recognized Animal Pain Awareness Month. Darci Palmer, meanwhile, has built a parallel reputation in anesthesia education, with roles spanning Washington State University, Auburn, and now Tuskegee University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, where she provides both didactic and hands-on clinical training. (veterinaryanesthesianerds.com)

The broader backdrop is a profession-wide shift away from reactive pain control and toward earlier, more structured intervention. AAHA’s 2022 Pain Management Guidelines for Dogs and Cats explicitly call for a proactive, preemptive, and multimodal approach that involves the whole veterinary team as well as pet parents. The guidelines’ summary also stresses training the entire team to recognize painful conditions early and to build pain management into care planning, rather than treating analgesia as an add-on after the fact. (aaha.org)

That framework matches the themes McNerney has been advancing publicly. In AAHA coverage tied to the pain-management certificate course, she said veterinarians prescribe medications and procedures, while technicians and nurses often spend the most time with patients, handling administration, monitoring, and follow-up. She also argued that collaborative decision-making leads to more comprehensive, individualized treatment plans. That’s notable for clinics trying to improve consistency in perioperative care, especially as staffing constraints make better technician utilization a business issue as much as a medical one. (aaha.org)

Palmer’s own educational work reinforces the same operational point from the anesthesia side. In a Clinician’s Brief podcast on anesthetic recovery, she described recovery as a critical phase and focused on avoiding common pitfalls and improving best practices. Patterson’s long-running coverage of Palmer likewise highlights her emphasis on mentorship, specialty training, and translating anesthesia knowledge into day-to-day patient care. Taken together, the two podcast appearances suggest that anesthesia and analgesia education is increasingly centered on systems, preparation, and recovery quality, not just drug selection. (cliniciansbrief.com)

Why it matters: For veterinary teams, this isn’t just a continuing-education story. It reflects a sustained push to make pain assessment more standardized, multimodal analgesia more routine, and technician expertise more fully integrated into patient care. In practice, that can mean clearer pain-scoring workflows, stronger anesthetic recovery protocols, more deliberate client communication with pet parents, and better alignment between veterinarians and support staff on what comfort-focused care should look like before, during, and after procedures. AAHA has also published a pain-management toolkit to help practices operationalize those recommendations, suggesting the next phase is less about awareness and more about implementation. (aaha.org)

What to watch: The next signal will be whether these conversations translate into broader adoption of team-based pain protocols, certificate training, and measurable workflow changes in general practice, ER, and specialty settings. As more educators like McNerney and Palmer keep centering prevention, recovery, and technician-led monitoring, clinics will be under growing pressure to show that pain management is embedded in care delivery, not treated as optional polish. (veterinaryanesthesianerds.com)