“It’s been a slow process,”: PG Veterinarians burned out by appointment backlog

Nurses and doctors aren’t the only ones feeling the effects of the pandemic.

Veterinarians are also burning the midnight oil as they continue to look after our furry friends.

Casey Bockus is the Service Manager for the Prince George Veterinary Hospital located on 18th Avenue.

Last March, facilities such as theirs were asked to only see urgent or emergency cases putting all vaccinations, spaying, or neutering procedures on the proverbial back burner.

Once the Veterinary Hospital re-opened its doors to the public during the summer of 2020, they faced an eight-week backlog on its appointment schedule as well as a 10-12 week logjam on its surgical procedures.

“It has been a very slow process since June trying to climb out of that hole. Our surgeries are currently looking at a six to eight-week mark right now while appointments are substantially longer than we have ever dealt with,” added Bockus.

The pileup has led to longer days for veterinarians and an unrelenting workload.

“From June to October our veterinarians were working 16-hour days – they are only scheduled for eight hours but in order to catch up on the number of emergencies and other appointments they were seeing they were here for extended periods of time.”

“Burnout is a thing that is becoming quite prevalent in the industry and that is why we have had to put some protocols in place to protect our veterinarians from being overworked at this point. None of them have been able to take vacation since before March (of last year).”

Bockus added dental procedures are by far and away the most common type of appointment being booked.

“A lot of the ones that are booking that far out are dental procedures and these animals are uncomfortable, they have dental disease or they have a broken tooth so those animals are dealing with a level of pain and discomfort for a longer period of time.”

To ease the pressure off of his staff, Bockus has been forced to hire veterinary locums from regions like the Lower Mainland.

However, he admits it hasn’t quite put a dent into the work volume they’ve been seeing since the summer.

“It hasn’t even been the relief to get our doctors off vacation wise, it’s been a relief to get our appointments caught back up. Clients for the longest period of time (in Prince George) were used to calling in and getting an appointment in a couple of days and now to have to wait eight weeks or longer was a huge shock.”

“We have locums that can come up and provide some relief and that has been more beneficial to us in recent months coming out of the initial lockdown. We were a bit apprehensive to bring in locums up from Vancouver because they were seeing a lot more cases than we were and we didn’t want to run the risk of having a COVID-case and having to close down altogether.”

Like most sectors, Veterinary care in Prince George across the north faces its fair share of unique and geographical challenges – such as a lack of access to emergency care.

“There are some major components to that. A lot of the veterinarians that are working in bigger centers like Kelowna, Vancouver or Victoria, they have access to emergency facilities after hours. A regular veterinary clinic would close at 5 pm and then anything after that would go to an emergency facility – here, we don’t have that option.”

“Our biggest struggle that we find in not being able to get veterinarians into this region is that BC as a whole hasn’t fought for the number of seats that we need at the Western College of Veterinary and Medicine to supply the veterinarians in this province. I think we are given 20 seats a year and our population is bigger than Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and they are all granted the equal number of seats as we are and we can’t get them back into British Columbia.”