NORTH ADAMS — At North County Veterinary Hospital, Dr. Lindsay Cermak cares for animals and, by extension, the humans who walk them through the front door.
Her practice, like that of her peers throughout the county, is busy.
Her office fields upwards of 10 calls every day from prospective new patients looking to establish care for their pets, but Cermak said her office manager must break the news that they're not accepting new clients right now.
“It's hard,” she said. “Sometimes it's people with new animals, puppies and kittens, and they're not finding a new vet, or sometimes it's someone who, unfortunately, didn't have a vet and now has a pet who's getting older, getting sick and needs help.”
Finding a veterinarian in the Berkshires, and beyond, has become a significant challenge in recent years for a number of reasons, including a rise in pet ownership during the COVID pandemic, more veterinarians retiring or otherwise leaving the field, and the difficulty — and expense — of attaining a veterinary degree.
“There's been a shortage of veterinarians in specific areas of veterinary practice, particularly anything rural or semi-rural, for a number of years,” said Dr. Alastair Cribb, dean of Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, Cermak's alma mater. “Then, as we went through the pandemic and came out the other side, we essentially hit what really is almost a global shortage of veterinarians.”
In Berkshire County, that's left some pet owners hitting frustrating walls as they try to receive care for their new pets. While not impossible — some local providers are taking new clients, though likely booking appointments months in advance — others are offering appointments only to existing pet patients.
“You can definitely see the shortage, because there's a lot of practices that are not taking new clients,” Cermak said. “It's a problem, because there's a lot of people getting pets and can't find a vet.”
To understand the factors that combine to create a frustrating situation for pet owners and even vets themself, another local veterinarian, Dr. Michelle Looney, points back to the changing attitudes surrounding pet ownership she's observed throughout her career.
When she started out about 30 years ago, she said, the family cat and dog were just that; animals. But the human-animal bond has evolved, and now many view their pet as a part of the family. As a result, more pet owners are willing to pay for a range of treatments.
“More people want to do more things and take better care of their of their animals,” said Looney, chief of staff at Pittsfield Veterinary Hospital on West Housatonic Street. “Even if finances are tight, they'll find a way to do it.”
Meantime, veterinary medicine has advanced to the point where there are many more options for care than there was the decades ago, according to Cribb.
“People got more pets, but they also got much more attached to their pets,” he said. “We saw, particularly during the pandemic, that people wanted to go further with the care for their pets than they had before.”
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE
In the Berkshires, there have been local ripples that exacerbated industrywide trends. For one, certain communities in the county saw second-home owners spending more time here, and attracted new pet-owning residents from the New York City area, according to Looney.
In 2022, the well-established practice in Pittsfield, Allen Heights Veterinary Hospital, closed its doors. The Berkshire Humane Society, sensing a gap in services, opened a veterinary clinic in its place the following year.
The need for the clinic also arose from heightened demand at existing vet offices. For year, local veterinarians provided shelter animals with free or discounted care, said John Perreault, the humane society's executive director. As those vets grew busier, they struggled to serve shelter pets on top of regular clients.
The clinic's second function is to provide limited services to the public three days a week by appointment, administering vaccinations, certain preventative treatments and care for some health issues that may arise.
“The client base we're trying to reach are those that can't get into their own veterinarian on time for something they may need,” he said.
There's one gap still unfilled that the clinic can't bridge — that of a full-service emergency veterinary hospital. There are no such facilities in Berkshire County; the closest are in Latham, N.Y., West Springfield and South Deerfield.
Looney is aware of complaints about the lack of 24-hour care in the county. Pittsfield Veterinary Hospital used to serve as the animal emergency room of the Berkshires, she said, with technicians staffing the building overnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and veterinarians on call.
Staff worked hard to keep the emergency services running, she said. It became unsustainable around about 15 years ago.
“For 10 years we worked on keeping it open. We really tried,” she said, noting she herself helped staff the ER. “We finally closed it because we didn't have enough clients or staff to keep it open.”
And Looney believes the care at animal emergency rooms in neighboring counties eclipses what the former ER was able to provide.
It often took about an hour for a vet to respond while on call, she said, about the time it takes to drive to one of the animal hospitals that are already set up and staffed to respond to emergencies.
“It's no difference in time for the animal,” she said.
Pittsfield Veterinary Hospital does, however, keep about five appointments open every day for emergency visits. Veterinary technicians also handle appointments for blood draws, vaccinations and some small procedures, Looney said, offsetting some of the workload.
The story of the county's only animal ER closing is representative of a shifting paradigm in veterinary medicine, Cermak said. Where pet veterinarians once were expected to be on call 24/7, Cermak said the model has shifted to one more closely resembling that of human primary care doctors and emergency departments, with dedicated urgent care facilities set up to handle emergencies outside of business hours.
The on-call model also led to exhaustion on the part of veterinary medicine providers, Cermak said. Juggling family and professional obligations became an “impossible balance” to strike.
“The veterinary profession is now largely women, and if you are having a family you want that work-life balance,” she said. “That's hard to find, and can lead to leaving, or professional or mental health struggles.”
In March, Berkshire Veterinary Hospital on Crane Avenue in Pittsfield, owned by Portland, Maine-based Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, stopped providing on-call vet services on Sundays. According to a note posted on the company's website, the practice has just two full-time vets, which it said “limits our ability to keep up with demand.”
The company said it was “unable to increase our staffing due to a national shortage of DVMs and veterinary technicians.” The decision to scale back Sunday availability was made to “ensure the health and wellbeing” of the providers it does have. While the facility handles emergencies overnights most days, it does so just for clients.
Those providers, Cermak said, are prone to developing “compassion fatigue,” where people respond to the negative effects of absorbing the trauma of others with exhaustion and sometimes detachment. On top of the emotional distress associated with interacting with sick and dying animals, Cermak said the financial aspect of industry also adds stress.
On the provider side, Cermak said many vets graduate saddled with debt. Despite salaries high above the median in the region, it isn't always enough to avoid financial hardship.
Meanwhile, she said, costs of medical supplies and overhead goes up every year, only worsening since the pandemic. It can be tough to relay to pet owners the cost of care, and even more difficult when they can't afford to pay. Cermak said pet insurance isn't very common, leaving the option of financing the cost of care using credit.
“Everything costs more than it used to, so just to balance that, to be able to pay our staff and supplies, we do have to raise prices,” she said. “Then it comes back on the veterinarian, when, unfortunately, sometimes people can't afford the level of care they want. And that's mentally taxing for us.”
Following the unexpected death of its founder, Dr. John Reynolds, Pittsfield Veterinary Hospital was purchased by Vetcor, a Norwell-based company that owns 896 practices in the US and Canada. The company also owns Greylock Animal Hospital in North Adams.
The outlook
Cribb leads New England's only veterinary school, located in North Grafton just outside of Worcester. The college in 2022 increased its annual class size from about 100 to 150 students in response to the growing demand for vets, he said.
And because Tufts receives state funding, approximately 40 students in each class must be Massachusetts residents, some of whom presumably will remain in the state to practice.
Cribb said vet schools across the country have also been increasing enrollment. Meanwhile, over a dozen new veterinary schools have been proposed across the U.S., and await accreditation from the American Veterinary Medical Association; though Cribb said none of the prospective new programs are in New England. The other regional schools are Cornell University to the west of Berkshire County, the Long Island University College of Veterinary Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Cribb expects it will take up to seven years for the increased capacity at vet schools to raise the number of veterinarians practicing in the region. But even then, he expects the picture may not improve as much in places like the Berkshires among them, compared to urban centers.
“It'll be easier to get appointments, it'll be easier to find a veterinarian,” he said. “But I'm going to guess there will still be shortages in rural and semi-rural areas.”
“Those are lifestyle choices,” he added.
