After-hours vet cover for pets: what’s available?
IF you have an emergency with your pet, and the local vet has closed for the night, the weekend, or the Bank Holiday, what are you meant to do?
Here’s the answer: you just need to phone your vet’s normal daytime phone number. If the phone is not diverted automatically to a phone that’s answered, you should hear an answer machine message that gives you the number to dial for after-hours care. At worst, you may be asked to leave a message, and the vet will get back to you shortly.
In most countries around the world, vets are not obliged to provide after hours cover for animals. Instead, it’s left to market forces. Vets decide whether or not they wish to offer an after-hours service. Animal owners are then free to choose a vet who provides the level of service that they want. In Ireland (and in the UK), the law offers stronger protection to animals. All vets are legally obliged to provide twenty four hour cover so that everyone can be certain that if they have an animal in distress, they will easily be able to find help.
This obligation is part of the Code of Professional Conduct which is published by the Veterinary Council: this sets out the ethics and rules that apply to all areas of veterinary practice.
In the past, vets always provided after-hours cover themselves. When I qualified, I had to work a one-in-three rota, as part of a three-vet practice. I was “on call” one-in-three nights and weekends. In those pre-mobile phone days, I had to stay indoors, within reach of a phone land line, at all times.
Most vet practices across Ireland still provide their own after-hours cover, but mobile phones have at least given vets much more freedom when they are on call. Despite this, the basics remain the same: they have to be ready, at any time, to drop what they’re doing to attend to an animal in trouble.
The on-call part of a vet’s job is one of its biggest challenges. There have been times when I have been up for most of the night, doing operations and attending to sick animals, and then I have had to carry on with a normal working schedule the next day. It’s easy enough to do this once in a while, but when it becomes part of the normal working week (as it does, for example, during the lambing and calving season for many rural vets), it can be difficult to sustain.
Many young vets cite the on-call commitment as one of the most stressful aspects of the job. To be able to work cheerfully and productively over months and years, you need to have sufficient “down time” to relax and recuperate. To live in harmony with friends and family, you need to be able to spend enough time with them. The on-call commitment is often blamed for the high rate of depression, family breakdown and suicide in the veterinary profession. For this reason, vets have been trying for some time to find ways of easing this burden while still ensuring that animals are able to access the care they need in emergencies.
There are two ways, introduced in the past decade, that vets have changed the way that after-hours care is provided.
First, many vet practices have organised shared rotas: for example, two three-vet practices might join together to offer a joint on-call service. This means a one-in-six on call rota, rather than one-in-three. The vets will be busier when they are on duty, but at least it happens less often, so they have more proper time off to be with family and friends, and to unwind away from work.
Second, in some areas, vets have set up dedicated pet emergency clinics. These are centralised premises that are staffed with vets and nurses who are scheduled to work only at night, weekends and bank holidays. The difference is that these individuals are not “on call”: they are actively working. They do their busy shifts, then they go home and sleep in the daytime. These emergency vets and nurses work the opposite hours of other veterinary staff. The lifestyle doesn’t suit everyone, but for some people, at certain times of life, it offers a useful alternative to a standard working life. Vets who work in emergency clinics are given special training, so they become experts in dealing with emergencies, including a wide range of surgical and medical crises. The result is that pet emergency clinics offer the optimal type of veterinary care. When your pet is seriously ill, rather than the on-call vet just treating your pet then going home, there’s a dedicated team to stay with the sick animal all night, observing them continuously, making sure that they are safe and receiving the best possible care.
Pet emergency clinics need to be “fed” by a high number of vet clinics to be able to generate a case load busy enough to justify the financial cost of continuously employing a team of vets and nurses. This means that they can only be set up in areas where there is a sufficient density of population. In Ireland, at the moment, there is only one pet emergency clinic, in Dublin, servicing over thirty clinics in Dublin and surrounding areas. For people who use them, the down-side is that they usually need to drive further than they’d normally have to travel to reach the vet. The up-side is that when they get there, the service for their pet is likely to be as good as it can get.
You may never need a vet after-hours, but if you do, there’s always one waiting for you.