The cost of Veterinary Care 

Now this is a controversial subject guaranteed to get peoples blood boiling. 

One of the main goals of Safe Haven Vets is to provide quality care at reasonable cost; and I use the term reasonable rather than affordable for a reason. 

Since the inception of Safe Haven I have looked at the genuine costings of veterinary supplies and providing a service similar to other health care professions. We as owners are ingrained with the concept of a National Health service. We see this as free health care; we arrive at the Doctors, hospital or A&E and no money changes hands. We go in broken and hopefully leave fixed. 

But in reality we do pay for this service, through National Insurance and taxation, we just never think about it. 

Having just had surgery myself, I was blessed to have been able to use private health care thanks to money from my parents. I would not have been able to afford it without their help. The laparoscopic hernia repair cost over £5000. What did I get for this money? A private hospital room for a few hours, attentive nurses, a fleeting visit from my consultant surgeon and a brief discussion with the anaesthetist, the medication to go home with and a single post op check. I don’t get follow ups for free beyond this. If I want to talk to the consultant I have to go through his PA. Yet we accept this. We are accepting of far less service from the NHS which is greatly overstretched. Waiting weeks for results, being unable to book GP appointments for weeks, surgeries being scheduled for sometimes years in the future. Yet we pay for this NHS and we accept it. 

Now lets think about the veterinary service. 

Myself and my colleagues all over the UK provide a service where we are far more available than any GP anywhere, where you can demand a same day appointment and usually get one, surgeries are often organised within days, lab results within a few days at most of sampling, and if you phone and want lab results or just to talk with your vet you will be able to do so within 24 hours (heaven forbid the vet takes holiday!). We bend over backwards for fear of being yelled at, being told we are cruel for making an animal wait 24-48 hours for a non-emergency illness, and being told we are making animal care generally unaffordable. 

But from your vet – you get a better service than you get from private health care for humans, at a fraction of the cost. The equivalent surgery to the hernia repair I had, I have performed on dogs for less than half the cost and been on tap for advise post op with no PA acting as my go between. My initial consultation with my consultant for my hernia cost £330. He is a soft tissue laparoscopic surgeon. So am I. Yet I charge £70 for a consultation and I come to your home as a 21 year qualified very experienced general practitioner, and cover a far broader range of illnesses than he’s treated in decades. My follow up ultrasound – was another £335. This was not included in the cost of surgery even though it was carried out because I had concerns over the outcome of my surgery. If this had been an animal I had operated on and I told an owner who had concerns that something had gone wrong I wanted another £335 to ultrasound their pet – DEAR HEAVENS!!! The sky would fall in and I would be under the rubble of verbal consternation, abuse and threats of being taken to the RCVS. 

Veterinary costs in that light don’t seem so bad do they. Owners expect human level care for their pets. In general terms they get far better in relation to access to advise and direct contact with a surgeon, yet at pittance compared to what the equivalent human care would cost. Owners treat their pets as family members. They want the same level of care – but don’t even fathom the true costs.

I recently saw the bill for the treatment of a snake bite in the USA including a 3 day hospital stay. Bear in mind they have no national health care system. What did it cost? Almost $250,000. Yes quarter of a million dollars. 

We think animal dentals cost a lot of money. What does a human pay privately for the surgical extraction of a molar? Around £500-600. I checked. One tooth! But we anaesthetise, have a nurse monitor this, often over 2-3 hours of treatment, do a FULL dental assessment, scale and polish and often remove in the double digits of bad teeth, AND provide full follow up care for between £600 and £1000. Massively more value. Yet owners have a coronary at the cost. 

Here’s my advise. When you look at an estimate for your pets care, be that medical or surgical, do what you do for everything else and Google it; Google the cost of the equivalent in private human health care. I can guarantee you it will suddenly seem like a bargain!