When COVID-19 hit the United States in March 2020, veterinary professionals found themselves in the unique role of being “essential” but without the same support structure afforded our human medical counterparts.
As the number of patients seemed to increase, supplies decreased. We covered shifts as colleagues quarantined. We stood in the rain and snow to discuss cancer diagnoses with clients through car windows. We did our best to preserve our client relationships and our team members’ health.
Now, two years later, we are honoring the strength and resilience of our veterinary profession by telling your stories, in your own words. Click through this 3-part series of curbside confessions.
Part 1
As COVID-19 introduced a new and uncertain landscape, stress levels rose for clients and veterinarians alike, adding new tensions to daily practice life.
Feeling connected with clients is really important to me. A lot of the good feelings I get from my job are generated from client satisfaction—dogs and cats can’t tell me if they were happy with their experience or not. It’s been challenging to keep my energy up because I couldn’t get that nonverbal information from clients over the phone.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
For some of my clients, they are the only person to take care of their pets. I’m thinking of one client in particular who told me, “If I die, there’s no one to take care of my dogs. So I can't die.” And I worry about my clients who live by themselves. They don’t see anybody but me, and if their cat were to die, then they wouldn’t even see me.
—House call veterinarian in DC metro
We’re seeing more negative interactions with clients. Everybody is doing the best they can. But clients are definitely more reactive, and we have also become more reactive, because we’re burned out, we’re exhausted, we’re emotionally raw.
—Practice owner in Florida
It seems like clients are less patient, and I think it’s because nobody is okay right now. Everybody's really stressed out, not just us veterinarians. Clients are experiencing stress in their own jobs, in their own family, and we're right there with them.
—Practice owner in Boston
What surprised me the most during the pandemic is people’s behavior. The rudeness, the entitlement. It floors me. Some clients I never expected to hear [something negative] from… like really, they said that?!
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
Although pet owners know what’s going on with supply chain issues in general, they are still not really understanding why they can’t get their dog’s therapeutic diet. Everything’s on back order.
—Practice owner in Boston
We got so much pushback when we first started letting people back inside the clinic with a mask policy. Constantly saying, “You need to wear a mask. And now pull it up over your nose. No, not on top of it…” It was the same thing over and over. Honestly, I give up. I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of the stress on my staff.
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
I wear a mask that nothing’s going to get through. Since things have gotten better, I give clients the choice to wear a mask. Some dogs are really uncomfortable with their owners wearing a mask, especially in the home. I have one client whose home I still have not been back inside—I treat her pets on the front porch.
—House call veterinarian in DC metro
We’re trained to communicate with clients face-to-face in an exam room with their pet present. Being curbside, I never once saw a client for a year and a half. Every single appointment was, “Here’s a pet, get on the phone, talk to the person.” There’s a lot of back and forth on the phone. Initially, it was really hard just to get people to answer their phones or have their phones on them.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
I got tired of talking on the phone. I feel like I can gauge the interaction better in person than over the phone. It's so hard to “check this bump” on a dog with curbside.
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
Clients already feel isolated from their pets’ health because pets can’t communicate verbally. When communicating over the phone, the client can feel even more isolated, and they might even feel like their concerns are not being addressed or they are being taken advantage of. When clients don’t get to speak to anybody and never see the veterinarian, they might not see the value in an exam fee.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
Even when we were curbside, we let clients in for euthanasia. It was hard for me because if I put someone’s cat to sleep and I think the owner needs a hug, I offer a hug! We started using extension sets so we could stand 6 feet away. But then you have to push really hard and have extra flush and it doesn’t feel warm…you never want people to feel that way with a euthanasia. So that was hard.
—Veterinarian in a feline-only clinic in DC metro
Curbside took away all the niceties, all the pleasantries of the job. It became all business.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
Part 2
Veterinarians also faced challenges within their practices, from understaffing and overfilled schedules to conflicting opinions about the world beyond the practice.
We furloughed our staff down to bare bones in March 2020. Almost right away (end of March–early April), we were getting calls saying, “I got a new puppy.” At that time, we were only seeing existing clients with pets that were sick. We weren't seeing these new puppies. But we realized we have to see these puppies—if we're not seeing new patients and everybody else is doing the same thing, then we're going to have a whole bunch of puppies with parvo or puppies that won’t be vaccinated or spayed or neutered. So we started seeing them and the calls just kept coming and coming.
—Practice owner in Boston
How quickly we went from having a certain burnout to everyone’s burnt out, everyone’s tired, everyone needs a raise, everyone’s quitting.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
As a veterinarian, I'm a people pleaser. I want to keep people happy. I want to see their pets. It's a struggle between seeing their pets or burning myself out. It got to the point where I had to step back and say, “I can't do this to my staff.” We have to slow down, and if we lose people, we lose people. We just can't physically do it. Can we squeeze one more in? Probably. But when every day you're squeezing one more in… everyone's crispy and I just couldn't do it anymore.
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
We had to change our scheduling so we wouldn't get burned out. We blocked off more same-day appointments, blocked off a longer lunch, and stopped taking appointments earlier in the day. We were proactive about that, so I think for us it has been more sustainable, as opposed to a practice that maybe feels the pressure to just see everything every day. We tried to be very intentional about appointments so that maybe it wouldn't be so overwhelming.
—Practice owner in Florida
We were fitting in more appointments, because it seems like there were more people that needed to be seen. But then everything was taking longer. I feel like somehow we would end up booking four 20-minute appointments an hour, which doesn't work mathematically! And then those 20-minute appointments were taking 30 minutes, so that really doesn't work.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
We changed our scheduling. We added blocks for emergencies and limited the number of wellness visits we saw per day during the height of it to try to accommodate everyone and still have those open spots for when we needed to see someone. We saw more visits that were like, “I'm staring at my dog all day now and he farted three times today, so I need to rush right in.”
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
We didn't have to ever shut our doors, but a lot of clinics in our area did. They ran out of people to work. With that stress, I don't know that I would have gotten through the pandemic as a practice owner, truthfully. It would have been exhausting.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
When one staff member got COVID, we found out about one-third of our staff did not have the vaccine. Those [unvaccinated] staff members did not come to work for about 2 weeks, based on CDC recommendations at that time. So we decided to enforce a vaccine mandate for the clinic. Of course I don’t want any of my coworkers to get sick, but also from a business standpoint, we can’t have a skeleton crew for 2 weeks! We had to turn so many cats away and it just wasn't fair to the cats.
—Veterinarian in a feline-only clinic in DC metro
We were split almost fifty-fifty. Half of my staff got vaccinated as soon as they could and the other half still aren’t vaccinated. Trying to maintain our personal relationships has been really hard.
—Practice owner in Florida
The hard part with curbside is when you've got the pet in the building and you're getting meds together, you're having to pay staff to stand there to hold the pet. When normally that would be the owners.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
With curbside, I was a lot more efficient! I was able to move through exams and cases quicker (if the client was answering the phone!) because if you have a person in the room and the animal’s hiding behind them or the client isn’t handling it well, you have to go a lot slower and be more thoughtful. So not having an owner there it was like “Let’s check out this cat, let’s do the exam, let’s get through treatment, let's put the cat back in the carrier!” I think a lot of veterinarians really enjoyed curbside because in some ways our job was easier. If you're not the type of person that gets a lot of satisfaction from that client experience, you might thrive in this environment.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
Part 3
Throughout the pandemic thus far, veterinary teams have been resilient, rising to meet each new challenge with creativity, determination, and a no-nonsense attitude that will serve us well as we look forward to a post-pandemic world.
I’ve definitely embraced flexibility. If clients want to stay in their car, awesome. If clients want to come in, go into the exam room, whatever they need to feel comfortable…moving forward, I embrace the idea that we need to be more adaptive to client needs. People have different comfort levels of communication and it’s not just sitting in the exam room like we were trained. We need to be a lot more flexible and open.
—Relief veterinarian in San Diego
The pandemic made me think very proactively about what I can do to protect the mental health of my staff. Things like [scheduling] and making lunchtime longer. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention to mental health before, but because now everybody was struggling and everybody was stressed out, I realized I need to be ahead of this and make changes before things become problematic. I believe I will continue to think that way moving forward.
—Practice owner in Florida
I'm probably one who is guilty of doing too much, but I’ve made a concerted effort to be aware of our limitations. We're not going to do things faster, we're not going to squeeze in more procedures. We're not going to half-ass things just so we can see more patients.
—Practice owner in Boston
I need to protect my staff and keep them happy. I'd rather make a little less money and protect my people. There will always be another client. There won't always be another RVT.
—Practice owner in Oklahoma
We used to put up with a lot. We would put up with a lot of clients who weren't always the nicest. We would put up with fitting everybody in. We tried to be everything to everybody. We weren't great at boundaries there for a while. But there was a shift. It was gradually changing even before the pandemic, but I feel like the pandemic kind of cemented the idea for us that there's too much business for us to worry about not having business. So if you're going to be mean or not appreciate what we're doing, you can go someplace else, and that's okay.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
I became much less tolerant of bad behavior from clients, because I could see how damaging that was to my staff. I told my whole staff, you don’t have to tolerate it! I was never a the client is always right person, but I was definitely more tolerant of that behavior before the pandemic… but now I’ll never go back.
—Practice owner in Florida
The pandemic has been a time with significant increase in profits for veterinary clinics. To me, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we, as a field, are giving raises to veterinarians while not giving raises to technicians in a much more substantial way. That's not to say veterinarians don't deserve raises. They absolutely do. But technicians and other support staff, many of them make a salary that I would not be comfortable living on. And if that's the case, it's hard for me to look in somebody's eye and say, “You are great and wonderful at what you do and keep it up, but I’m not gonna pay you more.” When my business partner and I bought the practice [early in the pandemic], we gave everybody a significant raise.
—Practice owner in Boston
We have to be realistic with salaries. With previous generations of veterinarians, the goal was to get the best person for as little money as possible. And I think my generation of veterinarians knows that you have to pay people what they are worth. It’s easier to hire people when you’re willing to pay people what you yourself would want to get paid.
—Veterinarian in San Diego
The saying, “If you find a job you love, you'll never work a day” is bullcrap. Most of us grew up wanting to be veterinarians. We try to love doing the crappy parts of it, but you realize, “Wait, this is not fun.” There are parts of this I hate. But that's okay! Because at the end of the day, it's a job. It might be a career that we love, but it's still just a job, and there should still be other parts of your life that you enjoy just as much.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
Moving forward, I want to focus on not overloading ourselves. Remembering that we can only do so much.
—Practice owner in Boston
It’s really important for us veterinarians to have a therapist. Our jobs are hard, and this is a really hard time. And we are under a lot more stress. We take on so much emotionally for our clients. Not just our patients, for our clients. And it’s really important for us to get help.
—House call veterinarian in DC metro
We all should have therapists.
—Veterinarian in Ohio
There are so many negative forces, constantly. COVID has really shown that. If you can be the calm one, the zen one, even if it means sitting in your car and breathing for a couple minutes before you go in, you'll have better results with your patients and the clients.
—House call veterinarian in DC metro
There’s just so much noise, not even just from the TV and Facebook, but even within our profession, there’s been so much unrest and negativity. I had to stop listening and remember how much I love my job at its core. I think if I had done that sooner I would have been happier sooner. Hang in there. This is going to be super hard, but at the end of the day what you're doing is important. It matters and it’s going to continue to matter.
—Practice owner in Florida
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