I was texting with a friend the other day that lives outside of Boston and that I haven’t spoken with in several months. He asked me how work was going and commented that his dog’s vet “just up and quit with nothing lined up he was so burned out.” I responded to him that, unfortunately, that’s pretty widespread these days. His response was, “That’s absurd!” I have to agree with him. How did we get here? How did we get to a place where when my mom tells me that her cousin’s daughter just started vet school in Dublin, I respond, without thinking, by saying, “I’m sorry for her.” (Not about Dublin; Dublin is just fine, I’m sure. I’ve only been there as everyone was beginning to panic and shut everything down for COVID though, so I have a strange, incomplete perspective on the city.)
Back in the day every vet I ever talked to about my desire to join the profession went on and on about how rewarding the profession was, how lucky they felt to be a part of it and that they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Were all of them lying to me because no one was ready to admit how broken and imperfect the field is or how downright difficult it is to be in the trenches every day? Is it really because things used to be so different than they are now? A lot has changed since I decided this career was it for me, especially since COVID grabbed hold of all of our lives and won’t let go.
You talk to people about what is wrong in the field, and people will give you a lot of answers. One thing that has changed is the cost of education (not even just a veterinary specific education). I was lucky that I didn’t have any debt from my undergraduate studies. Between my choice of school, living at home, working as much as I comfortably could during school, my maternal grandfather, my mom and myself, each semester was paid for as the bills came out. I knew years before college that I would be going to vet school, and I knew it was going to cost me, no matter where I went. Unfortunately for me, my “state school” was almost as expensive for an in-state student as most out-of-state schools would have been.
I took out $227,000 for my four years of vet school tuition, fees and living expenses. I still worked as a vet tech on some weekends during the first couple of years of school and during the summers between academic years. Justin and I did buy a house, but our mortgage and escrow was less than the rent I could’ve paid for many apartments in West Philly. I was not living extravagantly. (We also were only able to buy the house because my maternal grandparents gave me my inheritance early to do so. I know I was incredibly lucky to have them and their support early in my life.) By the time I graduated (and failed to line up a job for immediate start), I had no money to make a loan payment until my grace period ended. When I made my first payment in November of 2013, I owed just under $260,000. People didn’t used to graduate with anything close to that amount of debt.
When I made that first loan payment, I had no savings left. I was 28 years old and had a couple thousand dollars in retirement accounts from low paying jobs as a kennel kid and vet tech. I didn’t feel comfortable paying more than $1000 each month toward my astronomical debt. (I recognize that $1000 a month is A LOT of money to a good number of people out there.) A thousand dollars a month didn’t even touch my interest. When your rates are 6.8% and 7.9% on a sum that high, good luck. It’s stressful. My financial situation is very different now because I, thankfully, have a very stable and financially responsible partner and have gotten lucky with my pay in subsequent jobs. Those loans are still there, but I’ve refinanced them twice and have gotten them down to a level that doesn’t cause me massive amounts of anxiety.
Technology, both medical and for personal use, is different now. Treatments and diagnostic options for pets are much better and much more extensive. People’s feelings about and the culture around their pets have evolved over the years, at least where I live. Advances in technology mean that medical care is more expensive; it’s no longer just antibiotics, steroids and a prayer. Social media and online reviews allow for the best, but also the worst, of the pet-owning population to be seen and heard by all. (Guess which tends to go viral?) People want to do everything for their “fur babies” or their “first child” (or their “favorite” child, in some cases), but they aren’t always financially prepared. (Thankfully, most of my clients are.) These things are all factors. I read stories every day of fellow vets bashed online and dragged through the mud for all kinds of situations out of their control by faceless keyboard warriors. So many of these vets are rundown, brokenhearted and wanting out of a profession they once loved. Although a surprise to my friend that his vet would “up and quit,” I was surprised it took that long for a friend of mine to experience it firsthand.
Some people blame the corporate takeover of the veterinary world. The medicine isn’t as personal, some feel. The staff is always expected to do more, to see more. The people that own these corporations don’t always have a veterinary background. The people that started the corporation I work for have finance backgrounds, and they don’t understand how veterinary medicine works. They have these neat little formulas that they want to make running veterinary hospitals fit into perfectly. My practice manager constantly has to “justify the payroll” to the powers that be. Once, our hospital was forced to hire a full time doctor because the higher ups thought that by adding the doctor, the appointments would appear. (In this field, you hire the doctor when you’re literally maxed out, not accepting new clients and booking your current clients’ routine visits weeks out.) Maybe in these strange COVID times, that could be true, but no one can find a doctor or support staff to hire. My friend’s boss in NH has been looking for a doctor for about a year now. I read pleas all the time from many hospital owners all over the country asking what they need to be offering to get any interest at all.
COVID times have presented their own problems +/- worsened some of the existing ones. Support staff in this field is not well-paid and can sometimes make more money flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant even though many of them have school debt and must pay to maintain their licenses. When kids couldn’t go to school or daycare, these secondary earners stayed home, not the breadwinners. Everyone and their brother adopted a new dog or puppy during the pandemic, many of them for the first time. The people that already had pets were spending more time with them, noticing more potential problems and had more available cash because they weren’t traveling, going to concerts or out to eat, so they were more willing to spend money on their pets because 1. the bond became greater and 2. the money was available. At the same time, hospitals had to push off wellness care and stop doing all non-essential procedures for a while in the spring of 2020.
Corporate panicked and furloughed 60% of our support staff when those mandates came out. The doctors’ hours were cut because we didn’t have the staff to support us all, so half of our doctors volunteered to furlough. Those of us left to work spent our days seeing only sick pets and puppies that needed vaccines, trying to adapt to new protocols for visits. After the chaos of our spring, several support staff and one doctor quit. We haven’t been able to replace all of the staff and never even considered looking for a doctor because of the decreased staff numbers. The hospital is still open reduced hours, with all of the doctors working less hours than we did pre-pandemic.
Every appointment slot is always full. Appointments are at such a premium that some clients call daily for several days at 8am to try and get a same day sick appointment. Our next appointment available to schedule in advance is in October. Our dental wait list is ~18 months long. When clients do manage to get an appointment, they bring a lengthy list of questions and concerns with them, sometimes about pets not present and usually with topics that require more than the 30 minutes their appointment is scheduled for. Amidst all of the tasks that a doctor has to do as the doctor for the patients right in front of them, there’s a never-ending series of questions coming in via phone, email and text, and the technicians need help drawing blood, trimming nails, taking x-rays, etc. Then clients get upset because 1. they couldn’t get an appointment 2. their appointment is taking too long 3. no one talked to them about [insert any number of problems here] 4. no one called or emailed them back quickly enough about [insert same problems here], the list goes on. That’s when clients start yelling, cursing, hanging up on the front desk staff or writing horrible reviews.
Everyone is burned out. I don’t know a single person working in vet med right now who would tell you that they are OK and happy with their job at this moment. One of classmates recently posted in our class Facebook group that she recently thought of leaving the profession entirely. Thankfully, her manager immediately worked with her to lighten her load. I just told my manager last week that I cannot increase my hours like she wants right now because it will break me if I do. Justin tells me all the time to quit, take a few months to figure things out, but I can’t do that to my colleagues who are also struggling or to risk that my own pets may not get care, if they need it, because too many people have left their posts. There’s a lot of guilt and anxiety right now. Everyone is emotional, clients and staff, for so many reasons. There is no end in sight, and no one knows how to fix any of it. Certainly, I don’t have any answers, or the bandwidth to try and find them.
I could go on, but perhaps that’s for another day. My perspective comes from a small animal GP owned by a corporate entity in a wealthy suburb of a major US city. Others have different variations, depending on the species they treat, where they see them and for what services, whether they work for themselves, for a small, independently owned practice or for a larger practice owned by a corporation. I could share with you my experiences, and those of my colleagues, about trying to refer patients out and how that’s becoming more and more difficult. I could choose to talk about health, mental and physical, of myself and those I know or read about in the field. (That’s another thing that’s different now- people talking about mental health and seeking better work-life balances. It’s something that can be a source of contention within the profession as well.) All I have left to say right now is that the status quo isn’t working and isn’t sustainable.
“If you were a quitter you would have given up on life a long time ago. The fact that you’re still here proves that you’re a fighter with hopes of better days.” ~ Sonya Parker
