Veterinary medicine is a caring, respected, and giving profession, dedicated to making life better for people and the animals in their lives. However, the profession has several challenges needing solutions:

 

• Graduates who lack self-confidence, who are not “practice ready” and often have very large student debt.

• New graduates struggle with the reality they face in the “real world,” once they realize the unlimited resources they had in school don’t work for most clients who have financial limitations.

• Mismatch between cost of specialty care and pet owner’s ability to pay which often leads to inadequate care, surrender to rescue groups or euthanasia due to cost of care.

• Rescue groups strained by numbers of surrenders and expense to provided needed care.

• Whether through relinquishment or economic euthanasia, the loss of these pets impacts the human family’s health and happiness.

• Compassion fatigue, ‘Burn-out’, and disengagement among our peers.

• Practice sales as a result of consolidation have yielded experienced veterinarians looking for meaningful ways to give back to the profession.

• Many small practices, overlooked by the consolidators because of their size, rarely have the opportunity to attract preceptors, who might be a good fit for the practice or even eventual partnership and ownership.

• Practice ownership seeming daunting given student debt and values of large practices.

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Each of these challenges tug at our heartstrings, especially when we hear of a veterinarian suffering from depression or dying by suicide.

 

While reasons vary, several factors are instrumental in this disengagement, including enormous student debt, salaries that are inadequate to service that debt and live the professional lifestyle they deserve, inability to raise salary due to lack of confidence and skills, and lack of work/family/life balance.