Dog owner calls search for emergency care a vet shortage 'eye-opener'
Local veterinarian says the pressures of working in rural Ontario are substantial
A Pembroke-area pet owner having to drive her injured dog an hour and a half to Ottawa for emergency care is "not at all surprising" and reflects an ongoing shortage of veterinarians in rural Ontario, a local member of the industry says.
"It happens every day," said Dr. Sharon Bell, owner of Christie Street Animal Hospital in Pembroke, Ont., about 150 kilometres west of downtown Ottawa.
"I work in a practice that only has one vet working each day and we're open six days a week. We turn away 15 to 20 people a day because we cannot provide service for them."
That's what happened to Kristal Macey one Tuesday last month.
Macey said her four-and-a-half-year-old bulldog Daisy was chasing squirrels when she jumped and came down on a piece of chain-link fence, opening up her chest.
"Like a sweater with the zipper down," Macey said.
While Daisy wasn't expressing any pain — "she's a big thick muscle bag of pure, pure love" — Macey was worried about an infection.
So she called a number of veterinary hospitals: two in Pembroke — including Bell's — plus others in Cobden, Petawawa and Renfrew, Ont., including Daisy's usual doctor, she said.
"Everybody was just too busy, short-staffed, couldn't take an emergency call because they were just too full."
'I can't leave her like this'
A hospital in Cobden said they could preliminarily assess Daisy's condition by looking at pictures while their doctor was in surgery on another animal, Macey said.
But after about 45 minutes of calls, "I thought, 'I can't leave her like this. I have to go to Ottawa,'" Macey said.
After pre-booking an appointment, Macey drove Daisy 90 minutes to Stittsville Kanata Veterinary Hospital, where the dog received 24 stitches upon arrival, she said.
The drive to Ottawa was stressful, Macey said.
"Thankfully my mother was with me. She was able to sit in the back seat and kind of hold the dog a little bit and try to keep the wound closed."
Macey said the experience was an "eye-opener" on the impacts of veterinary shortages.
'No quick fix'
The vice-president of medical operations for VCA Canada, which runs dozens of veterinary clinics in Ontario and other provinces, said the shortage is national and predates the COVID-19 pandemic, when pet ownership rose.
"It's a combination of fewer veterinarians graduating and the ones that are graduating are working reasonable work hours as opposed to 60-hour weeks like I did," said Dr. Danny Joffe.
"We just don't have enough time or manpower to see every case within an hour. But everybody is doing their best."
Bell in Pembroke said there's always been a "scarcity" of veterinarians in the Ottawa Valley and that it's harder to recruit there than in the cities.
When she arrived in the area to work in 1989, "there was nobody competing for the job I was applying for."
"Now the entire province has a shortage," she said.
The pressures of working in a rural area are substantial, Bell added.
"I've been sleep deprived since I went to vet school," she said. "I'm up doing [animal] records too late at night. There's so many nights I finish records at midnight and I get up at 5:30 in the morning.
"I'd rather retire than work those hours and that will not help the community."
Joffe said some veterinary schools in Canada are taking steps to increase enrolment, "but that's going to be a minimum of four years before we see the benefits of it," he said.
Bell said younger industry members' move toward working fewer hours — while positive for work-life balance — means "we cannot graduate enough new veterinarians."
"We're losing [a] large number of older veterinarians, but they were working proportionally more hours," she said.
"There's no quick fix for this."
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With files from Rachelle Elsiufi