I don't want to have one foot out the door, but I do.
I like the practice I work for. The people are great, they strive for a good culture and to practice medicine with a high standard of care, so they attract some of the best clients around. But, I am still having days where I'm just ready to quit and find a new career. Why? Let's see...
Low pay. The most I've been paid is $25/hr and that's an anomaly. Mind you I got no benefits at that rate, so I was paying around $280/month for health insurance. With 5 years' experience and some heavy negotiation I'm now at $21/hr with benefits. That might be a dream come true for techs in other areas, but I'm in the California Bay Area -one of the most expensive places to live. My half of rent is $1100 a month. After 11 years my car finally died last year, so now I have a $140 car payment each month too. I don't have cable, I have a bargain-basement 500MB cell phone plan, and yet I have to watch every penny in order to have at least $100 in my account when my next paycheck is due. The thought of saving for retirement is laughable and yet we all know this is a physical job that we won't be able to handle forever. Most of us already have back problems just a couple years in.
High expectations. We are trained and expected to provide customer service, draw blood, place both IV and urinary catheters, take diagnostic x-rays, do ultrasound scans, calculate medication doses, understand how those medications work and be able to compound them as well, advise clients on blood and other testing, have knowledge about nutrition and the wide variety of prescription diets out there, take dental x-rays, scale and polish teeth, do dental exams, monitor anesthesia, scrub into surgery when necessary, suture skin and gingiva, do simple dental extractions and more.
Long hours. With an endless stream of appointments throughout the day as well as emergencies, surgical patients, and lots and lots of cleaning that needs to be done there's often no time for breaks. We're usually doing at least 2 things at once, more often 3 to 5 things. In an industry that requires high accuracy we often fail due to an unrealistic workload. This leads to us feeling like we're failing much of the time. And then, to top it off, we're routinely asked to skip lunches or stay late to get everything done.
Employers are sympathetic, but say they cannot afford to pay more and say the workload is necessary to keep the clinic afloat. The catch phrase is that everyone knows there's no money to be made in Vet Med yet clients are always complaining about cost.
I don't know the answer. I do know that if employers can't pay more and the workload stays at level "insane" we have no choice but to leave the industry due to burnout. I graduated 5 years ago and over half my class no longer works in the industry. All the experienced people leave and the clinic spends more time and money training new graduates driving costs up and service down.
Maybe once all the new hires at my hospital (including me) are trained our workload will be easier to handle, but there's really no room for growth and that's something I need to decide if I can live with. I'm currently planning on working to get by VTS in Clinical Practice in 2018 and that may open up new doors within my current practice or in education or something else. We'll see. I'm passionate about Vet Med, but I want to do adult things like own a house, save for retirement, and have things like vacation days and more than 3 sick days a year (especially since this industry is #1 in suicide). I also really, really, want to stop crying at work.
