There are six numbers saved as favourites in my phone: my partner, my parents, my sister, my best friend, and the after-hours emergency number for the local vet clinic. In the past three years I’ve called the latter more than a dozen times.
The most recent was at 2am one night in May. My horse Mickey, a thoroughbred who collects vet bills like it’s a competition and he’s winning, was showing signs of colic – the dreaded abdominal pain that is the leading cause of premature death in horses. The vet arrived by 3am, with frost crystallising on her breath, and cooed sweetly at Mickey while administering pain medication. She called again at 8am on Sunday and then again on Monday to make sure he was OK.
I am lucky to have access to such a service, and to such excellent local vets. In recent months they have changed the after-hours number to introduce a telehealth service to triage the concerns of panicked pet owners and, as a pet owner who is extremely prone to panicking, I understand why. The same vets who answer my calls in the middle of the night are doing surgery or attending emergency calls at 8am. They’re berated for things they cannot control, such as the prognosis of the animal or the cost of care. Large animal vets work alone, travelling long distances to see clients who rarely pay their bills on time.
It’s no wonder that so many vets – particularly those in regional areas – are leaving the industry.
The veterinarian shortage is not a looming crisis – we’re in it, right now. According to the Australian Veterinary Association, it’s been ongoing for eight years.
“At a practical level,” the AVA president, Dr Sally Colgan, said in a statement last week, “this means that Australia does not have the vets it needs to deliver essential veterinary care.”
Colgan’s comments were in response to a report from Jobs and Skills Australia on the food supply chain workforce, which said there was a shortage of vets and vet nurses in every state. The shortage is particularly acute in regional areas and in large animal practice. The proportion of job vacancies left unfilled was 16 percentage points higher in regional areas: 44% of advertised jobs vacant for more than 12 months compared with 28% in metropolitan areas.
The proportion of vets working more than 50 hours a week also increased with remoteness, from 25% in metropolitan areas to 32% in inner regional areas, 37% in outer regional, and 42% in remote and very remote parts of the country.
The JSA report suggested governments should consider introducing the same incentives used to encourage general practitioners to work in regional and remote areas to veterinary practice, including reducing or waiving university debt for vets who live and work regionally, a dedicated training pathway and additional training places for large animal practice, and support in accessing childcare and housing.
It also recommended that vet students, who have to complete 52 weeks of mandatory placements as part of their training, be added to the new commonwealth prac payment scheme. It’s not uncommon to have a vet student turn up at a house call or appear alongside the treating vet at a clinic. No one – neither the student nor the supervising veterinarian – is compensated for taking part in this professional development. After the University of Melbourne closed its U-Vet teaching hospital at Werribee in 2022, one vet told me that they were concerned about the increased burden on working vets to offer placements with no additional support from the university. Even a small gesture like providing working vets with access to journal articles would help, they said.
Greencross vets, the largest privately-owned provider of veterinary services in Australia, has since taken over the U-Vet clinic site and operates a 24-hour vet hospital, hosting clinic rotations for vet students.
The JSA said that “placement poverty” – the inability to earn money through what amounts in vet science to a full year of required of placement – is one reason students may not be specialising in large animal practice, and why drop-out rates peak in the later years of study.
And placement is particularly important because, as the JSA noted: “Day one standards of competency for veterinary graduates are high compared to medical graduates who complete two years of postgraduate residency with governments sharing the costs of providing medical student internships.”
Placement poverty “disproportionately affects veterinary students”, Colgan said, adding that “supporting them is critical to sustaining the profession, which is as essential to our communities as healthcare and education”.
The JSA’s other recommendations included considering mandatory registration of vet nurses; reassessing funding for veterinary science courses, which have the highest shortfall between average teaching cost and base funding of all courses offered in Australia; and developing a national veterinary workforce strategy, including improving visa pathways for qualified veterinarians.
None of these recommendations or findings are new – most were also made in the NSW parliamentary into the veterinary workforce shortfall last year, and have been loudly suggested by the AVA for several years.
Both the NSW inquiry and the JSA report found that salaries for veterinarians have remained relatively stagnant, with graduate salaries ranging between $60,000 to $85,000, despite the rising cost of living and the much higher salaries offered in similarly highly qualified fields, such as general medicine. Just 15% of veterinarians earn more than $156,000, the NSW inquiry found, compared with 50% of doctors and dentists. It is worth noting that 70% of vets in that state, and the majority of vets nationwide, are women.
Unless the shortage is addressed, both reports warned, the pressure on remaining vets, particularly in regional areas, will increase.
It’s a crisis that requires federal government intervention. And, as 69% of Australian households own a pet, it should be one that receives broad support.
