Rural veterinary practices forced to reassess after hours offering

Along with the emotional toll being exacted on vets everywhere, the ongoing shortage in rural and regional areas is increasing the after hours load on those that remain, to unsustainable levels.

One of those who knows all about the pressures that being a vet brings is Clermont's Tess Salmond, who grew up next the vet surgery there as the daughter of 'Gilly', Alan Guilfoyle, one of the most respected vets in rural Queensland and Australia.

After graduating in 2004, Dr Salmond worked all over North Queensland either as an employee or doing locum work before buying in to her father's practice in 2014.

In May last year they sold to Apiam Animal Health, a publicly listed company with 59 veterinary clinics employing 296 veterinarians in dairy, beef, sheep and pig regional centres around Australia.

Dr Salmond said the sale had been like taking a 20kg kettlebell off her chest.

"A lot of people are anti-corporate, the same in agriculture, but even the big well-run family grazing operations these days are almost corporate in their structure," she said.

"We came out wanting to be vets, wanting to save animals, and then you're wrestling this big business beast as well. It's just exhausting and so overwhelming."

When they sold, their wages were about a million dollars a year.

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As well as the enormous overheads in the practice that need to be balanced, small business is very personal.

"I felt the weight of the clients on me, and trying to live up to their expectations," Dr Salmond said. "I felt the staff's happiness weighing on me personally. A lot of that's still there - I'm still the leader, but there's definitely a wall there now and I'm finding it easier to be more objective about it."

The new arrangement has a teletriage service, where phone calls from clients are diverted to a vet nurse, who either offers advice or passes the case on to the vet on duty.

It lessens the risk of burnout, the main problem confronting vets working in small rural and regional practices with not a lot of back-up.

Both Dr Salmond and Charleville Vet Surgery co-business owner Courtney Scott say that's without a doubt the issue that threatens to overwhelm many.

Some in the profession, such as Dr Donna Webber, who had a private practice for 22 years in Cloncurry before taking up work as a sales nutritionist for Stocklick Trading, wonder if new graduates are fully prepared for the demands on their time.

Dr Webber, who has just taken up a role with the Department of Agriculture, based in Roma, ran a single-vet practice and said it had been drilled into her at the University of Queensland that as a new country vet "it was going to be a raw deal for a couple of years".

"(New vets) want to have their nights off so they can do whatever, fair enough, but vet probably isn't that profession, to be true," she said.

"That's my experience, and I was a rural vet for a long time.

"In the bush, you just need to be available.

"You might be home with your family, or out at the dam having a picnic with your kids but you're still on the phone.

She said that being a single vet, she was out of town and out of range quite a bit, which her clients understood.

They had an alternative option of vets in Mount Isa but Dr Webber said she still found people waiting for her to come home.

"Animals are that invested in people's lives, not just your cats and dogs and horses, their cattle, their stock - they want good advice, they want to trust the person who's going to give it to them," she said. "They want to know that that person's got their back."

However, Dr Scott said that if something didn't change soon, "vets are just going to burn out and we won't be here".

"It's taking a big toll on mental health and ultimately we have to make our business sustainable to be able to continue to run," she said.

"Comparing my friends from uni, none of them are working full-time in a practice. They've gone down the locuming and contracting route because it's more flexible, the money's better and they can choose to travel and go where they want.

"So we're at this big divide where we're so short on vets that we have to pay whatever anyone's asking to come and work for us because there's just no-one else."

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Dr Scott said rather than vets wanting more time off, she believed they needed it to cope with the expectations people have.

"Expectations have changed to how they were 20 years ago - the value of cattle, the value of horses and dogs have all gone up significantly so when we get a working dog in, when previously it may not have been a huge deal if it didn't make it, now it's worth a lot of money," she said.

"And the hours, especially rurally, we have to work to fit in what we need to do, and be available 24/7.

"If we get called out in the middle of the night for a colic or a surgery, we go to work the next day.

"You can be awake for 24 or 48 hours because you've got patients waiting. There's no-one else to sub in."

Some vet practices at the end of their tether are choosing not to offer after hours services anymore, to protect the staff they have, which in turn impacts those that are left.

In Dr Salmond's words, the burden on the remaining clinics is becoming unsustainable.

While the profession tended to blame itself for the problem it finds itself mired in, she believes communities need to take some responsibility, citing the times she's been called out to help a horse in distress in the middle of the night, when a travelling vet has done their teeth a few days earlier.

"If the communities want a sustainable veterinary profession in the town going forward, they must support the practices there," she said.

"And yes, that means the young vets. You're not always going to get the vet you want, but we need to invest in these young ones.

"Awesome rural vets aren't born, they're made so we have to invest in them, because they're the future.

"If people don't use the clinics that are here then you won't be attracting the vets to have enough vets to go around, and you need a critical amount of vets to share the after hours.

"Otherwise the vets will do too much after hours, get burnt out and they will just close the doors because it's unsustainable, working all day and doing on-call night after night after night.

"You can read so many stories - people are doing amazing work but it's just brutal on them, brutal on the body, brutal on the mind.

"By taking the bread and butter work during the day, you can't have as many vets working in a bricks and mortar clinic and then you don't have the vets to do the after hours."

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