Advocacy in action – World Vet Day 2024

26 Apr 2024

 

The 2024 World Veterinary Day is celebrated on 27 April and has the theme 'Veterinarians are essential health workers'. 

The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA), the peak body representing Australia's veterinarians, has advocated that veterinarians are essential health workers since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian Government formally recognised the essential nature of veterinarians and considered them "essential workers".  

Dr Cristy Secombe, Head of Policy and Advocacy at the AVA, said, "Essential health workers provide essential services that cannot be stopped or shut down for any reason. They are not optional". 

"Broadly, the definition of an essential worker is one whose work is considered essential to the functioning of society, and without which, public safety, health, or welfare would be endangered or detrimentally affected", Dr Secombe said.  

All essential health workers provide a substantial public good, and everyone in the community needs access to these services. 

Public goods must be free or affordable for everyone in the community to be available and accessible. They cannot operate as a free market of supply and demand. Examples are human healthcare for illness and injury, pain and suffering, and disease control, as well as the work of the police to keep the community safe. Public infrastructure, such as hospitals and police stations, is needed to allow these public goods to function. 

Similarly, the community expects the veterinary profession to provide services and infrastructure for the public good in order to maintain the standards of animal health and welfare and public health that we expect in Australia and that we need to remain competitive in all markets. Veterinarians treat wildlife and stray animals who do not have a private owner, understand the value and care for our animal family members, and use veterinary knowledge to keep watch for disease surveillance - critical to maintaining biosecurity for both animals and humans and for safe food and products production.  

Veterinarians provide services and infrastructure not only for private (individual) benefits but also for public benefit (public good). The difference between veterinarians and human health essential workers is the substantial amount of public support provided to assist human essential health workers deliver their essential services. In contrast, there is minimal public funding through government veterinary services or in support of charities, which means that essential veterinary services need to be heavily privately funded from the goodwill of the veterinary profession and almost entirely by small to medium privately owned veterinary businesses,   

Underlying this disparity of support is the confusion that although animal ownership is voluntary, veterinarians' work to safeguard animal health and welfare and public health is not voluntary. Veterinarians are essential health workers who supply public goods. 

The AVA has been working hard to socialise the concept of public good to the veterinary profession, our stakeholders and the community. The inability to recoup the costs associated with delivering veterinary public goods makes the contribution of veterinarians to safeguard the health and welfare of animals and people and the sustainability of the veterinary profession vulnerable. This is a key contributor to the veterinary workforce shortage and negatively  impacts veterinary workforce sustainability. 

Work the AVA has done in this space includes: 

Once a value can be put on the amount of public good delivered by the profession that cannot be currently recouped, this will allow us to more accurately determine what funding we need to call for. 

We need every veterinary business and every individual veterinarian to participate in the data collection. The more information we collect, the stronger the data set is in asking for the support we need for essential services.

You do not need to be an AVA member, but your data will help the AVA fight for the value of your career and the sustainability of our essential profession.