Many veterinarians in Canada are facing extreme burnout and declining mental health
Veterinarians in Canada say they are experiencing extreme burnout and plummeting mental health due to staff shortages, a booming number of animal patients and the round-the-clock stress of the job. Ne...
I left healthcare 2 years ago. Most people are leaving these positions because of lean business practices leading to severe burnout. We would have no problems filling open positions if there was proper staffing and proper compensation. And I don't believe that money is the sole issue. When you are trying to do the job of multiple people and find yourself not being effective in helping patients because of elements outside of your control, you end up realizing that what money your are getting is no longer worth the hit to your mental health. People that choose these positions genuinely want to help others but there is a breaking point and we are seeing it in real time right now.
And I don’t believe that money is the sole issue.
Oh, but it is. 'Provider' is but one layer needing more and more money to compensate for effort and risk.
Money is the grease driving all layers of this direct-pay-for-care model; including the incentives driving each round of executive cost-shaving, because that's how management earns incentives. And while the output is executive bonuses, the input - what this feeds on - is people and their money and their coping and happiness. More and more. Custom-uh, patients pay more, care-givers work more, actual care is reduced, managers deal with more turnover, and execs buy lambos.
If you want to see a care system that is at risk but usable, look at the happiest countries. And then understand why that's at risk and decide whether we want to preserve it. Unfortunately, care-givers and other layers of the machine who no longer have to lay out hard cash for every effort and action will see their paycheques drop with those costs, and that'll make them sad if that's how they derive validation.
And while I'm talking about human acute care, mostly, the same goes for long-term care, veterinarian, and even ancillary-to-care sectors like transit. Greed at all levels in a zero-sum model makes victims of the people it's supposed to care for.
To the people going "everyone is," I'm thinking you may not know a veterinarian.
We have a rural vet, so she's mostly a 1-person operation (she has a vet tech). She gets calls at all hours, from people she doesn't know, who are desperate, rude, or both. She was telling me about a woman who called about her puppy who was struggling to breathe. It was an hour drive away, and from experience she knew she needed to be up front that there was going to be a fee for her coming out. After being told what a shitty person she was, the woman just hung up. So, there was a puppy out there, struggling to breath, and either the vet needed to drive two hours on her weekend to help it, and possibly not get paid, or quite likely this dog dies some slow painful death.
People seem to think they're entitled to a vet, and when she can't see someone as soon as they'd like they get angry. When it's time to pay, people can get angry. There was an accident by our town and the fire department brought in two dogs that were thrown from the car and in bad shape. She had tried to make them as comfortable as possible while trying to contact someone from the family. She ended up doing a bit of work, but when the wife of the driver was finally found she simply refused to pay anything. Said she didn't ok any of it.
So consider that a vet goes into this profession because they love animals, but day in and out they're seeing them suffer terribly, and often much more than is necessary because people are ass holes. From beyond our own vet I've also heard lots of stories of people just ghosting after they've learned how much some treatment will cost, or wanting to put down animals that are just "too old." Vets sit at this intersection between helpless animals and how society treats animals. Well, and now how people treat people.
My partner is a vet tech and prior to that worked in an animal shelter. She recently left her vet tech position because of the stress, burnout and some toxic behavior by the humans and colleagues. Part of the issue is the cultural and legal perception that an animal is property with the entanglement of the entitlement people have that the "do whatever you can to preserve life" oath extends to doing things for free. Between these two, people think they're entitled to have veterinary care for their animals, but fail to understand that the care is expensive and when faced with it, their mental thought process quickly switches to assessments about the value of their animal. It's pretty sad.
Almost need some sort of animal healthcare, funded by pet licenses at like $1000 a year. If you don't have a pet license your pet can't get treatment. But when treatment is needed it's free.
So... optional then?
But, that's already a thing? VCA has a treatment plan you pay into monthly, and animal health insurance exists that's way more that $1k/year and varies based on stuff like existing conditions and the age of your pet.
I don't expect the municipalities that collect the $1000 to magically make it stretch further.
This needs to be a thing
Yeah, the US is having the same problem with medical workers. None of the urgent care doctors in my area stay in the position for more than a couple of months. All the veterinary places are three to six months out for appointments. It seems really weird to have health care shortages. I know at least on the doctor side we probably lost a lot post COVID.
There's thousands of kids that get rejected from the education system because they got 97% instead of 98% average or because they got 100 hours of volunteer time instead of 150 hours due to having to work to pay for school.
We could have a bunch of 97% people filling in these medical positions but the degradation of medical services would be so atrocious we would all wish for the time we needed to wait 8 months to see a specialist for that time sensitive medical condition
If I ever need urgent care I could always go to a truck stop and ask around to find the immigrant who spent 30 years practicing as a family physician back in Kenya but now drives truck because we won't recognize their skills other than to bring them into the country
I feel like that is happening to everyone in Canada . I have to work 2 jobs just to not get evicted . I haven't been able to get caught up on my bills since last Christmas and now it's almost Christmas again ....
Nationalize it. This degenerate "business comes first" bullshit is costing us key talent.
aren’t we all