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Having been in the industry and seen a lot change in my thirty plus years working in our market, I decided that I’d put my current thoughts on here for our members’ perusal.  It’s pretty interesting to just put pen to paper on how much has changed in that relatively short time.

When I first started working at a veterinary clinic, in the kennels; walking dogs and cleaning runs, feeding dogs and cats and cleaning litter pans, as many of the people who will be on here got started, the average office call was somewhere around $20-25 and the diagnostic tools were limited to traditional X-ray, an old reflotron lab machine, and a few other simple tools, combined with the veterinarians’ skills in the clinics I worked at.

Our records were all handwritten and a big part of any position in the practice was being able to ready the writing in the charts…IF you could find the chart and it hadn’t been misfiled.

All of the veterinarians that I worked with were skilled surgeons, and comfortable performing even most simple orthopedics.In that area, it was an hour and a half drive to the nearest board certified veterinary surgeon or any other kind of specialist, so the veterinarians just HAD to have a good base knowledge across almost any animals’ potential illnesses.

Most veterinarians still did mixed practice where I grew up, so it was actually unusual to see a veterinarian that wouldn’t work on anything except one segment of the market.  It was just expected that “Doc” could handle any animal you drove or trailered in.   Plus, those same veterinarians generally saw their own emergencies, so the hours were much different than they are today for most vets.

Additionally, then, the veterinarian was most often a man, with only around 15-20% of the veterinarians being women.Back then, there were only a few specialty practices and they were often at the nearest university.

Technicians made (at least me, anyway), around $4.50 or $5 an hour and receptionists were around the same.The “practice manager” was often just the oldest employee in the building who had somehow, over the years, sort of shifted into the role of mom/dad/manager/therapist/bookkeeper/babysitter that most managers have even now.

The typical heartworm preventive was a daily pill that people gave (usually when they were drinking their morning coffee) called filarabits and our usual method of flea control was one or another of the flea/tick sprays that are still out there.

None of the clinics I worked at really sold much prescription dog or cat food, but we did sell a little, mostly just a better brand of food than the local big box store sold.We saw a lot less of clients coming in with a preconceived diagnosis because, even if they had a cellular phone, it was just for calls, not browsing the internet for articles on pet health.

Today, vaccine clinics have taken on a big part of what used to bring people to their vet, spay-neuter clinics do a vast majority of those surgeries and websites have taken a large percentage of the drugs and supplies market away from veterinarians.

Specialty and emergency practices have blossomed, with at least one in most towns; offering after hours emergency care, boarded surgeons, dentists, internists, cardiologists etc, to aid the general practice in the overall care of the pets.

Those pets have become family members rather than possessions, with a lot of families considering their pets as one of the kids, albeit a furry kid.Now, records are almost all digital with many practices being paper-free or paper-light.

X-rays are digital, providing an image in seconds rather than after a few minutes in a darkroom.Monitoring is pretty standard during surgery with advanced multi-parameter monitors beeping steadily at the head of the surgery table to help our skilled technicians and veterinary assistants keep an eye on the pets.

The anesthetic process is much more similar to the human surgical suite now than it was thirty some odd years ago, with pentobarbital no longer in use and metofane and halothane gone away, having been replaced by sedatives and tranquilizers to calm the pets, followed by isofluorane and sevofluorane as the inhaled anesthetic agent.

Now, we have flea and tick products that are collars, topicals, chewables, or pills and some of them last as much as three months.  Heartworm products come in topical, chewable, tablets, injectables and some of them last as much as six months.The sprays and daily products have become much less popular since I entered this industry and there are online sources trying to take away as much of it as they possibly can.

The average office call in my area is between $50 and $60 now and technicians are making between $12 and $20 an hour typically, with their skillset playing a large part in where they fall on that scale.Receptionists are generally between $10 and $15 an hour and vary dependent on skills and responsibilities as well.

The majority of veterinary clinics now have an actual titled practice manager with more and more of them becoming certified every day.  That person is the practice owners’ right hand man/woman and is there to let the veterinarian come in, practice medicine and go home, rather than staying after business hours or coming in early and doing the bookkeeping, scheduling, payroll etc as they used to do.

Most of the graduating classes at veterinary schools are made up of only around 20% men now, for one reason or another, so it seems that the nurturing aspect of that role has attracted a larger percentage of women into it.  Corporate practices are growing their footprint in the industry by leaps and bounds, giving many of our retiring veterinarians the ability to sell their practice where there might not have been a market before now.

Long story…well…long.  What I’m saying is that our industry has changed a LOT over the last thirty years and doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all.  All that being said, I still genuinely enjoy working with the people (and animals) in this industry and really hope that our industry stays the same sort of place that it has always been with people who are in it because they enjoy working with animals and want to work with other, like-minded people.

I truly hope that this site can provide a central marketplace/meeting place that does nothing but help our community improve and grow.  Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts on this topic and I hope everyone has a great summer!