Most record updates serve the household. This one serves a reader who will make clinical judgments from what you hand over. When you change vets, the new practice inherits her medical file from the old one, yet feeding knowledge often travels only in your head and your kitchen habits. Written feeding notes close that gap, and before the first appointment they deserve an honesty pass. The six entries stay constant: precisely which food and flavor she eats, the texture it is served in, how much each meal contains in your household's measures, the times of her meals, which treats are approved, and what she must never be given. What changes is the standard of truth each entry must meet for a clinical reader.
Writing What She Eats, Not What the Plan Says
Owners commonly record the intended diet: the food bought, the portion recommended, the treats officially allowed. A vet reading history needs the practiced diet instead. If she is served half a pouch but reliably leaves a third, write both figures, served and eaten, because the eaten figure is the one her body is actually running on. If her texture preference has quietly narrowed, if she once accepted food in gravy and now only eats a smooth loaf, record the current truth and roughly when it changed, because a narrowing appetite for textures can matter to a clinician even when it looked like fussiness at home.
Meal times and approved treats are the entries owners most often soften. Record the times she is genuinely fed, including the late evening top-up that never made it into earlier notes, and list every treat she receives, from every person in the house, with honest quantities. Treats are the classic hidden calories and hidden ingredients in a cat's day, and a new vet assessing weight or a suspected intolerance will ask about them directly. Notes that already answer, completely and without embarrassment, save a consultation from becoming an interrogation and give the vet a baseline worth trusting.
The Never-Given Entry as Clinical Information
Anything she must never be given carries a different weight for a vet than for a sitter. For a sitter it is an instruction; for a practice it is a clue. Beside each forbidden item, record why it is forbidden and how that was learned: a previous vet's instruction, a reaction you observed, or a diagnosis recorded in her transferred history. If you avoid a food only because she dislikes it, say that plainly instead, so the clinical reader does not mistake preference for prohibition. Accuracy here protects her twice over, because a practice planning treatment, anesthetic recovery feeding or an elimination trial starts from exactly this entry.
Take the written notes along to the first appointment as a document, not as answers you hope to remember, and invite correction. The new vet may advise changing a food, a portion or a treat habit, and any change agreed in that room should be written into the notes the same day, replacing the old entry rather than sitting alongside it, so the file never describes two diets at once. Note beside the change that the vet advised it and at which visit, because a future reader, including a locum or an emergency clinician, will treat an advised change differently from an owner's experiment.
Keeping One Version True After the Change
After the appointment, retire earlier versions of the feeding notes wherever they live. A sitter working from last year's sheet, or a cattery holding an old copy, can undo a vet's careful adjustment in a weekend. Send the updated notes to anyone who feeds her, keep the household measures consistent with what your kitchen actually uses, and let the document settle back into its everyday job of guiding feeders. The clinical pass you gave it for the change of vets leaves it stronger for every other purpose too, since a record honest enough for a vet is honest enough for anyone. Pet Passport inside KinsLe holds the corrected six entries as her single feeding record, accompanying her history to the new practice and back home again.