A common assumption about the day-to-day experience of veterinary professionals is that they play with animals all day. While this assumption has elements of truth, it’s not the full picture of what happens on a daily basis behind closed doors. Veterinary teams are challenged with routine care of small and large animals to challenging cases, terminal diagnoses, and euthanasias. From working with pets to production animals, veterinary professionals often experience a rollercoaster of emotions. Unsurprisingly, there are many challenges facing the veterinary community causing a workforce shortage from individuals leaving the field due to burnout, compassion fatigue, financial reasons, retirement, and sadly death by suicide.
Many veterinarians experience moral distress. This occurs when someone is prevented from doing something that they know is right, and leads to increased stress levels. This can happen for a variety of reasons, a client being unable to afford appropriate treatment, if a client wishes to continue treatment despite a poor quality of life for the animal in question, animal abuse or neglect cases, and so much more. A recent study found veterinarians experience this type of moral distress several times per week and continues to impact them throughout their career – regardless of the number of years they have been practicing medicine.
Veterinarians and veterinary staff often struggle paycheck to paycheck. Veterinarians go to medical college for the same amount of time as a human doctor but the student loans are in excess of 200-300k and there are no options for student loan forgiveness. The average salary for a veterinarian is much less than a human doctor also. While human doctors can file insurance and ensure they receive payments for services rendered, veterinarians cannot.
They depend on services being paid for at the time they are rendered, without enforcing this, their bills and staff would not be paid. Veterinary professionals go into this career because they truly love and care for animals. The cost of care is driven by the cost of medicine, not the individual clinics. Low-cost clinics are often non-profits and receive grant subsidies to help offset their operating costs. Often, low cost clinics are the same price if not more expensive than your established clinic. Alternatively, private practice clinics have to pay for all their own medicine and equipment, staffing, etc.
In the social media age, client interactions no longer end when the veterinary staff go home. Most practices maintain an online presence to spread the word about the great work they do. Unfortunately, this can be aggravated by people that send, post, or share negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. Cyberbullying has become one way that people can try to ruin a business that’s sole purpose is to help animals. You should always remember, there is more than one side to a story.
While we all strive to be able to help every animal that we come into contact with, we are also human beings and we can only do so much in a day. If you contact your veterinarian and they are completely booked and they refer you to an Urgent Care facility or Emergency Room, there is a very good reason for that. It is not because they don’t care for your pet! The veterinarian may be in an emergency surgery, euthanizing a beloved pet, comforting an Owner who just had to listen to a hard diagnosis for their pet, there are many reasons why we refer out, but never because we don’t care.
At the end of the day, veterinarians and veterinary support staff are human beings working in a career that they love and adore.
This career is also one of the most hostile environments because pet owners expect these wonderful staff members to take their verbal abuse and harassment. We wish owners understood just how it feels to leave work at the end of the day after being belittled and verbally abused and then come in and do it again the next day. With that being said, more clinic owners are now stepping up and no longer allowing this type of abuse to their staff. If terminating a bad client is the way to ensure a safe working environment for staff, then that’s what will be done. It is our job as clinic owners and practice managers to stop the abuse of our staff. If we want veterinary medicine to grow and flourish and help every animal possible, then we have to remember that kindness and understanding goes a long way. What we tolerate from owners has to change. Not all owners do this, there are more that are respectful and kind than not. If we join together, we can make a positive change for all animals. What better goal to set?
