07/19/2021
Hi all,
I wanted to share some important information with everyone. 12 million people adopted pets during COVID, and the effect is being felt nationwide. In larger cities, even as close as St. Paul, there is up to a 3 month wait on routine surgeries, and up to a 3 hour wait at emergency hospitals.
We too have been overwhelmed with appointments lately, and as such have not been able to get everyone in, even some sick patients in a timely manner. We are trying to figure out some ways to see more patients, but my staff is already overworked, so expanding hours is not an option.
One of things we have implemented in order to make sure we are seeing every patient we can is having new clients pre-pay for their exam. It is not ideal, but new-clients miss a high percentage of appointments. When some one does not show up for an appointment, it means a sick et may have been turned away when we otherwise could have seen them.
We have expanded this prepayment system to emergencies and to clients who have a history of missing appointments. Again, we know this is wildly unpopular, but this is something we have to do because other pets suffer when we do not.
Case in point, someone calls because their dog was hit by a car, they live an hour away, but their normal vet is not answering the phone. We tell them to come right away. While we are waiting another client calls because their dog was hit with porcupine quills. We tell the porcupine quilled dog that they have to go to Eau Claire, thus upsetting the client, and the pet has to suffer a little longer. The hit by a car dog never shows up, we call them and they tell us their vet called them back, so they went there...but it's too late for us to help the quilled dog. Situation like this occur almost daily. Which is why we have to have people prepay, when appointments are missed, we are not worried about our finances, we are upset because we were forced to turn away a pet we could have otherwise helped.
I realize the lack of availability has angered some people, but you are not helping your pet by becoming angry with our staff...I already went through that in a previous post, so I will not go into details on new hurtful messages.
Finally on emergencies, we are still seeing emergencies, but our on-hold times are now up to 30 minutes. There is no feasible way around this, especially on weekends. Many surrounding hospitals have dropped their after-hours call. Which means our emergency lines are going off non-stop (calls are coming from as far away as Baldwin, and Hayward). We're trying to help as many people as we can, but leaving angry voicemails about on-hold times (yes we get a few of these) will only result in us also dropping afterhours emergency services.
99% of our clients have been very understanding of the new situation we find ourselves in. And we are very thankful and grateful to have such a wonderful client base. In a few years there will be more veterinarians, and a lot of these problems will be corrected, for now, we will continue to do our best to help as many pets as we can.
Kamran Khan, DVM
