A sitter can only give medicine safely when the note in front of them removes every decision. Your bird already has a prescribed daily medicine and a veterinarian who set the instructions, so the handoff is a copying and rehearsal job, not a writing job. Anything you paraphrase can drift; anything the sitter has to interpret can go wrong at the exact moment the bird is wriggling in a towel. Build the packet in writing, agree the paid sitting terms in writing as well, and treat a sitter who is not confident after practicing as a reason to change the plan, not to hope harder.
Copy the Veterinarian's Words, Word for Word
Start the note with the medicine name exactly as it appears on the labeled bottle or box, spelled the same way, with the label kept with the bird so the sitter can compare the two. Underneath, copy the veterinarian's instructions word for word: the dose as the veterinarian wrote it, the timing, and the method, reproduced rather than summarized in your own phrasing. Leave the dose out of your own words entirely, because the dose lives in the veterinarian's words and nowhere else. Add the handling detail the label cannot carry: how you towel or hold this particular bird, which side you approach from, how slowly you deliver the syringe, and the small signs that this bird is swallowing calmly versus clamping the beak shut. Finish this section with storage: where the medicine lives, at what conditions the label directs, out of reach of children and other animals, with the cap checked after every use.
The Missed-Dose Rule and the Tick Sheet
Write the failure plan as plainly as the success plan. If some of a dose comes back out, dribbles away, or the bird refuses it outright, the sitter records exactly what happened on the tick sheet and phones you or the veterinarian for direction; the sitter never guesses how much went in, never estimates a replacement amount, and never gives extra on their own judgment. That single rule prevents the dangerous error in syringe care, which is a doubled dose given with kind intentions. The tick sheet itself is simple: one row per scheduled dose, with the time given, the sitter's initials once it is done, and a notes space for refusals, spitting, or unusual droppings and appetite afterward. A sheet with a gap in it is information; a sheet filled in from memory at the end of the trip is fiction. Leave the veterinarian's number, your number, and the emergency clinic's number at the top of the sheet.
Practice While You Are Still Home
No note, however exact, teaches hands. Before the trip, the sitter watches you give at least one full dose from catching to release, then gives the next dose themselves while you watch, talking through each step as they do it. That rehearsal surfaces the real questions: how firmly to hold, what this bird's protest looks like, and when struggling means stop and phone rather than persist. Keep the rest of the routine in the packet too, in brief form: food, water, cage cover time, and who else may enter the room. A short practice also settles whether this sitter is genuinely willing, which is a fair thing to learn before you leave rather than during it. When the packet is finished, share it through KinsLe so the instructions sit inside Care Pass, visible only to the sitter you named and only for the dates of the trip.