A Critical Moment in the Development of WRMD

To all Wildlife Rehabilitation MD Users,

Devin and Rachel

We feel that WRMD is at a critical moment in it’s development. It has been designed, tested and used and we are now at a time where we are very visible to the entire rehabilitation community. We now need to help support our fellow rehabilitators who are attempting this transitions. When you first sign-up and look at the database, it might be intimidating. There is a lot to work with and navigate around, especially if you are not familiar with computers. We have noticed that some centers get excited, sign-up and stop using the database. It is important that everybody understands that this database can be as simple or as complex as you want and it can adapt to your needs. If all you record is the species, date admitted and final disposition, you have made a giant contribution to wildlife rehabilitation. The more data recorded, the larger your contribution to the rehabilitation community and the wildlife we serve.We are doing our best to share this database and help as many facilities as possible. We want you and your rehabilitation community to help support our efforts in getting the word out and helping other facilities in your area that might be transitioning to a digital system. Many centers and individuals are doing this in their communities already and the impact is obvious. We are noticing that as rehabilitation centers begin to actively use WRMD, other centers near them begin to sign up.Our only invested interest in your decision to use WRMD is what the data can accomplish for wildlife. This is an amazing gift for all of us, because of what can be achieved as a community. Our mission stands firm “Sharing our experiences to save more lives”. The reason we have poured our heart and soul into this system is to make it easier for rehabilitation centers to record data for their own needs and for the needs of wildlife rehabilitation and it’s future.At some later date, if your facility decides to participate, we may have enough data collected amongst all the wildlife systems to make a significant change in the welfare of wildlife. Imagine having enough data to really monitor the effects of cats, rodenticides, windmills and other impacts on wildlife. With this data, we could contribute to nation wide policy changes. This could possibly be one of the greatest scientific contributions to wildlife, ever.