PROFIT-DRIVEN VETERINARY MEDICINE:

A good indicator of a company’s true priorities can be determined by listening to its employees — not the corporate narrative that is controlled by its CEO. Based on research conducted by CARE for Pets™ which analyzed company reviews listed on the leading job websites — many employees of veterinary consolidators say their employer prioritizes profits over patient care.

COMMON EMPLOYEE COMPLAINTS OF VETERINARY CONSOLIDATORS — PRIORITIZE PROFITS*

  • 6 price increases within 1 year and employee pay hasn’t changed. They don’t care about their employees, clients or patients. They are just investors. Corporate employees only visit practice when something is affecting them financially.
  • So focused on buying more hospitals, they can’t even staff the hospitals they already own.
  • Profit over care. Company always telling you to make more money and overbook your schedule, even if you have very few or poorly trained staff. They are always scheduling on the razors edge of being able to function.
  • Headquarters only cares about rapidly opening clinics to appease their investors even though they cannot find enough staff to maintain the existing clinics. Unless you are a DVM, they do not care about their support staff. When the staff suffers, the clients and patients suffer as well.
  • So focused on meeting monthly budgets that we often ran out of critical supplies including medications that you need to use daily.
  • The company has cut staff to a minimal amount at all of their hospitals to maximize profit, in order to expand corporately and open more hospitals across the country. Their number one priority is money before employee and patient care.
  • The company seems to care far more about expanding than catering to their existing hospitals. Prices change frequently (with no notice to clients or staff) when the company needs to make more money.
  • I ultimately left due to the company’s lack of care for patients, extremely money focused, lack of advancement and general disregard for employees.
  • They are 100% driven by profits, but they will tell you they care more about clients, employees, and work culture.
  • The corporate structure is a mess. They grew too fast and have people in high level positions with poor ethics/experience.
  • They’re trying to sell, so they’re cutting cost and trying to position well for a buyer. That’s all they care about at this point.
  • This is no way to run a business. Growing too fast and not enough people at corporate to support a hospital.
  • They bought the practice I worked in and everything changed for the worse. They destroyed our culture and numerous staff and doctors left.
  • All they care about is buying every hospital in sight and lining their pockets with money.
  • They are so concerned about buying up more clinics that they completely abandon the ones they’ve already purchased right after onboarding.
  • The focus from corporate was on pinching pennies rather than hiring enough employees to make the clinic run smoothly.
  • Company buys hospitals faster than they know what to do. The growth in hospitals did not equal growth on the support side. We were expected to see everything that came in door regardless of staffing.
  • Very little interest or support for practices that have been taken over. Embarrassing level of communication.
  • It’s about the money not the patients or clients, which is horrible and demoralizing.
  • Their leadership comes from other businesses, not veterinary medicine. So their concern is with the bottom line and not with medical care.
  • This corporation only cares about how to squeeze as much profit out of their businesses as possible. We are consistently understaffed and overworked.
  • The company is more interested in practice acquisition than providing existing clinics with capital for needed clinical and medical upgrades, and appropriately trained staff.
  • All this corporation cares about is numbers, specifically labor/payroll percentages. Regional managers are awful. There is very poor communication and all they care about are meeting their numbers.
  • Profit-driven; ruined a perfectly functional practice (corporate buyout). What we got instead was a barebones budget that left us constantly running out of vital materials, medications, and other supplies while also being required to raise prices several times throughout the year to meet profit goals.
  • Quantity over quality. It seems like they bought too many hospitals, too fast and are focused on the bottom line.
  • This was a numbers only driven practice with the goal to make more money for the corporation. Care to patients, or to the staff is not a concern at all.
  • Once the owner of the practice sold the company the place turned upside down to a money hungry business!
  • When they first bought our clinic they promised only positive changes. After awhile they began to focus on only money and payroll. They have staff meetings telling you how little money the clinic is making and force techs to upsell bloodwork and tell the doctors to upsell.
  • Focus only on growth and acquiring new hospitals and expanding hours of existing hospitals. Their upper management is stretched too thin to provide support to the hospitals they have.
  • Went through the typical process of a corporate buyout: Morale with the staff plummeted and negative reviews on google started rolling in from clients that noticed a difference in service, pricing, and overall happiness of the employees.
  • Focus is entirely on money, trying to see as many pets as possible. There is little to no support from management.
  • It’s unfortunate to be at a vet care place that clearly only cares about the money coming in and not the patients. They do not care about their employees and have a high turnover.
  • I knew working for a corporation was going to be a mistake and they definitely proved me right. the upper management has financial success as their number one goal and care nothing about the staff. the limited stock of medications makes it extremely difficult to treat patients according to varied styles of medicine. they continue to open clinics without appropriate staffing.
  • Every staff meeting the area management will come and talk about the great numbers and pull us one by one aside to tell us how we aren’t doing good enough, we should be faster, more efficient, push more products.
  • In the last year working there, there were at least 4 price increases in less than a year. But yet with all that increased revenue, no raises for the employees. Just money for them to acquire more practices.
  • Corporate and HR will not help if there are problems. They only care about the revenue per employee in the practice. Patient care is a low priority.

FOOTNOTES:

  • *Worker statements may be edited for length and or clarity.

VIEW EMPLOYEE REVIEWS OF VETERINARY CONSOLIDATORS:

  • Many of the leading job listing websites (including Glassdoor and Indeed.com) post employee ratings and reviews on the company profile pages of veterinary consolidators — reviews are typically not indexed by the search engines and are not displayed in search results.