7 May 2015
Vets Bills and NHS Costs
by Lynda Goetz
I had to take the dog to the vet this week and the impressive, if quite expensive, treatment it was given has prompted some thoughts about our expectations of the service veterinary practices provide for our animals and those provided by the NHS for us humans.
The receptionist I spoke to was helpful and offered an appointment for the same day. When was the last time that happened when you rang your GP? The last time I rang for a GP appointment I was offered one in two weeks’ time! There were not even any questions asked about how urgent I might consider my condition to be (although I recognise that had I insisted that there was a degree of urgency, they do keep some same-day appointments). A number of doctors have been quoted recently as saying that, although 10 days is currently the national average waiting time for an appointment, two weeks will be commonplace before very long; one was even quoted as saying that it would not be long before 5 weeks was normal. 5 weeks! No wonder people are turning to A&E in an attempt to ‘beat’ the system.
Vets’ initial training is the same as that of doctors, which is 5 years (or 6 if they ‘intercalate’ with a degree in another related subject). The 5 years is, if anything, more intensive than that of doctors as, from the very start of their training, veterinary students not only do a full 9-5 day of lectures and practicals in term time, but spend all ‘holidays’ doing completely unpaid work experience.
After the initial 5 years, doctors have to do two years in hospitals, currently known as F1 and F2. At this stage they are already entitled to call themselves “doctors” and are paid a salary but are not qualified in any particular area. They used to be known as ‘housemen’ during this further stage of their training. Following on from that they then need to decide which speciality they wish to follow and do the specific training in that area. For GPs this is currently three years: for other specialties the training can be up to eight years. During that time their salaries (and responsibilities) will increase in line with the NHS scale.
Contrast this with the poor vets who, after their 5 or 6 years, become MRCVS (Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons) and are not only expected to have a working knowledge of all sorts of different creatures from budgies to bulls but are thrown in at the deep end once they have completed their initial training. Those who go into a mixed practice will be called upon to treat and operate on everything from cats to cows, during a day which can last the full 24 hours if they are ‘on call’. That will be the poor s..d you call in the middle of the night when the cat has not stopped being sick or the dog is having a fit.
Young vets do not get the support offered to young doctors, who would routinely be able to call on a more senior member of staff if they felt unqualified or uncertain and would also have experienced nursing staff to hand. Although Vets have this opportunity in theory, they generally feel discouraged from disturbing their seniors and might be more inclined to use the internet or their mobile phones to ‘call a friend’. The stress levels caused by working in this way can only be imagined and yet I am not at all sure how much understanding the clients and the general public have of this or indeed of the levels of remuneration which young vets receive..
How much do you think the young vet in his/her (mostly her, by the way, as 9 out of 10 vets qualifying these days are girls) twenties is paid for their extensive knowledge and rigorous training? The answer is somewhere between £22,000 and £28,000 and, although this is not wildly different from the junior doctors, it probably works out at less than the minimum wage if calculated by reference to the hours they actually work or are on call. That is not very much for the very high level of expertise and knowledge which most of us probably take for granted when we call upon their services to help our sick pets. So how come we never hear about how overworked they are or how stressful they find their working environment and conditions? Presumably this is because they have all gone into the profession knowing that it is demanding and rewarding but not well-paid. Above all it is private. There is no large cache of ring-fenced public money available to be constantly fed into it to meet the increasing demands of the clientele. The equipment which is needed has to be paid for out of the income of the practice; the salaries of the employed vets and large numbers of veterinary nurses must likewise to come out of that income; the only money which comes into the practice comes from us, the individual clients who pay for vetinary services, or from the insurance companies we pay monthly to cover those unexpected illnesses.
However, because we are so used to receiving our own medical treatment from an NHS which is ‘free at the point of delivery’ most of us have no idea of the costs of drugs, equipment or treatments. The young vet who treated my dog confessed how disheartened she often feels at the number of complaints she receives about the size of the bill. There seems to be very little understanding amongst the general populace about the cost of things like blood tests or x-rays or CT scans and yet there is an increasing demand that these tests be done and done ever more quickly. The same is possibly true in the NHS, although here we do not complain about the costs as we have no idea what they are. Perhaps we should be given a statement each time we visit our GP or go to hospital which shows what the costs would have been if we’d had to pay them ourselves. It might just make us appreciate the demands we are placing on our Health Service and realise why our vets cost what they do.
