A sitter rarely needs your cat's full medical archive, but vaccination dates have a way of becoming suddenly relevant: a vet asking questions after a scrap, a cattery needed at short notice, a form that wants a date nobody in the house knows. If those dates live only in your memory or your filing, they are on holiday with you. The update for a sit is about producing a trustworthy summary, positioning it well, and removing the one decision a sitter should never face alone: a booster falling due while you are away.
Preparing the Sitter's Summary
Her vaccination record should list each vaccination with its date, what it covered, and the next booster due date, matched against her certificates. From that full record, draw a short summary for the sitter: the recent vaccinations, their dates, what they covered, and the next booster due date, copied exactly rather than rounded or paraphrased. Check the summary against the certificates once, because a summary with a wrong date is worse than none; it gets quoted with confidence. Leave it with the sitting instructions and show the sitter where it is, alongside the vet's contact details, so the two pieces of information a stranger might need sit together.
Date the summary you prepare, and write on it that it was copied from the full record. If the sitter ever reads a date aloud to a vet, that small provenance line tells everyone the figure came from certificates, not from somebody's memory of a visit long ago. Accuracy quoted confidently is a gift to a busy practice.
A Booster Due During the Sit Is Arranged Beforehand
Lay her due dates beside the dates of the sit before you leave. If the next booster date lands while the sitter is in charge, that is your appointment to make, not the sitter's discovery. Settle the timing with her vet in advance: either the visit happens before the sit, or a specific plan exists that the sitter is simply carrying out, booked and written down. Booster timing is the vet's call in every case, and the record sets no schedule of its own. What the sitter should never be asked to do is vaccinate her, judge whether a date can slide, or improvise around a lapsed entry; their role is feeding, watching, and phoning the right person, with the summary in hand.
Point out the next booster due date to the sitter explicitly, even when it falls after the sit ends. Knowing a date exists, and that it is already in hand with the vet, stops a helpful sitter from worrying, or worse, from booking things on their own initiative. Clarity about what is not their job is as kind as clarity about what is.
What the Sitter Does With the Record
When you come home, thank the sitter with the record as well as in person: ask whether the summary was needed, whether any dates were quoted, and whether anything about her health came up. Fold the answers into the full record the same evening, while memories are fresh, and the next sit starts from an even better summary.
Beyond due dates, the summary is reference material: there if a vet asks, there if you phone and need a date read back to you. Tell the sitter that plainly, so it does not become a source of low-level worry. If anything does happen, a visit, a call, a date quoted, ask the sitter to note it on the summary itself, and fold that note into the full record when you return so the history stays in one line. Small discipline, lasting value. Left ready in KinsLe for the sit, her Pet Passport gives the sitter her vaccination summary in the same packet as her other key records.