Part 2: How High Are Veterinary Medicine's Standards?

VETERINARIANS, WE GET WHAT WE PAY FOR.

I say we need to look at ourselves as a profession and ask ourselves why do we have zero minimum educational or certification requirements of anyone in a clinic who is not a veterinarian?

Every other medical profession has required minimum education standards for even the lowest member on the medical care team. When I go to the dentist the person cleaning my teeth and performing radiographs has a two year dental hygienist degree. The phlebotomist at my doctors’ office was not hired until she got her legal phlebotomy certification. (I asked her). Can you imagine going into human surgery and having a high school drop out, drug addict, with a felony record monitoring your anesthesia? That’s what we allow in our profession.

Why are we not demanding any educational or certification standards for our technical help? Why do we not require only licensed veterinary technicians to work in our hospitals?

Too expensive?

Or too shortsighted?

A licensed vet tech will cost, per hour, twice to two and a half times as much as a non-licensed tech. She may be a bit more pricey, but she relieves the doctor of having to perform technical work. Every time a doctor has to take an x-ray or look up a vaccination history or trim toenails or explain medication because the unlicensed tech has no clue what the doctor is asking her to do, the clinic is losing money. (Just recently, I had a tech who couldn’t figure out how to remove an I.V. catheter.) If a doctor is free to see more clients, the clinic makes more money. That income, in return, can be placed back into the clinic for hiring more licensed veterinary technicians, thus freeing up the doctor to perform her duties and earn more money for the clinic. And so on.

I say we also raise our prices and stop giving things away for free. Invest in promoting third-party payment and Care Credit plans, especially pet insurance. We need to start believing in ourselves as professional trained, educated doctors. We need to start raising our image. We are not the poor step-sister to our other professional medical counterparts. We need to stop acting like it.

I say that the doctor complaining about the lack of education and knowledge of the paraprofessional staff has it completely backwards. How can technicians be blamed for not living up to standards that don’t exist? We are the ones responsible for mandating professional certification standards. Not them.

Doctors should stop asking why the tech didn’t measure up to some wishful and vague “standard” we would like the technician to meet, and begin asking ourselves why we, as a profession, do not require any concrete certification standards for all of our paraprofessional staff.

Read the first installment of this blog by clicking here: Part 1: How High Are Veterinary Medicine's Standards?