Veterinarian Jo Hoad says she barely slept in the days before she appeared at a NSW inquiry into her industry’s workforces shortages.
It was nothing new for the Uralla Veterinary Clinic director and owner, who said she had been the only vet on call for the past 12 months, meaning she also had to work every second weekend to keep up with demand.
She told the inquiry the pressures being placed on her were typical across the industry, and that they appeared to get worse the further away from urban centres a clinic was.
The hearing was the first time the inquiry had sat in regional NSW.
It heard there was a need to broaden the acceptance criteria for potential veterinary students.
Dr Hoad said while academic results were important, a student’s grades should not be the only criteria for becoming a vet.
“Animals don’t always read the textbooks, they won’t behave in a way that the textbooks will say,” Dr Hoad said.
“When you’re out in the paddock, and things go wrong, you need the resilience and the adaptability to be able to come up with a solution, and you need the communication skills which don’t necessarily get taught at uni.”
Inverell Warialda Veterinary Clinic owner Greg Powell told the inquiry vets who were still working in the industry needed to be profiled to find ideal traits.
“You put on the business hat, you put on the vet hat, you put on the psychologist hat, and so on, there’s a lot of different hats to wear,” he said.
“Hence, adaptability is a big, big thing.
“I think it’s the way intelligence is measured that is the problem.”
No single solution
Dr Powell said he struggled to see if incentives would help bring more vets to regional areas.
“People have spoken about medicine and allied health, where there are quite a few incentives, and they’re still having problems,” he said.
“I just think people are going to struggle to be able to drag international students from large cities into rural Australian areas.”
Dr Hoad said it would be difficult to keep international students in the country after they graduated.
“If they were sort of given incentives to stay in a rural area, it has to be for a decent length of time,” she said.
“It’s quite expensive to spend 12 months training a vet up for them to just go again.”
Lack of services
The Inverell and Uralla clinics were already down staff the day of the hearing because staff could not access childcare services in the region.
Dr Hoad said her associate hadn’t been able to work for the past 12 months.
“There’s waiting lists of 200 to 300 kids in Armidale at the moment,” she said.
“Even human emergency doctors can’t get childcare and are thinking of leaving the area.”
