The Great Veterinary Shortage

When Michelle Stokes noticed a necrotic wound on her cat, Jellyfish, last July, she and her husband had to call about 50 vets before finding one that could squeeze them in.

The local emergency animal hospital was so backed up that it said the wound—serious but not yet life-threatening—wasn’t really an emergency. Jellyfish didn’t have a regular vet, because Stokes and her husband had just moved to the Cleveland area. They pulled up Google Maps and started going down the list of offices they found. It was the same response every time: no vacancies, not taking new patients, not until August or even September. Meanwhile, Jellyfish was getting sicker and more lethargic. “We just kept trying and trying and trying,” Stokes told me. “We pretty much called every single vet’s office in the greater-Cleveland area.” A week in, they finally got a lucky break. They managed to speak directly to a vet at one practice, and when Stokes sent over a photo of the wound, the vet said to bring Jellyfish in for surgery. The cat’s now doing just fine.

Stokes’s scramble to find veterinary care is not unusual. Hospitals, clinics, and vet offices around the U.S. in the past year have been turning animals away because they are short staffed. This crisis has hit all levels of the system, from general practice to specialists, but animal emergency rooms—where the job is most stressful—have it the worst. Veterinary staff told me of emergency hospitals closing overnight, owners being referred hundreds of miles away for an elusive open spot, and dogs with broken bones, a true emergency, waiting hours and hours to be seen. “When I have 17 patients in the hospital and there’s me and a doctor for 15 hours, I can’t take any more pets. Because I physically can’t do it,” Kristi Hulen, a vet tech in the Seattle area, told me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/not-enough-veterinarians-animals/661497/?utm_source=feed