If you run a veterinary practice, it will tend to be one of two types. There are practices in towns and cities that mainly provide care for pets – dogs, cats, parrots, hamsters, and so on – and there are other veterinary surgeries that provide services largely to farmers, looking after their cattle, sheep, hens, pigs, and so on, although those practices will also have quite a number of pets in their care as well.
Whichever type of practice you run, you need always to be there for the animals. At the moment, we have some serious incidents of avian flu, and you need to be there for those farmers who run free range hens because those hens are at present stuck in barns. Nobody actually knows how long this particular incident will continue for, but it could be for several more weeks yet. If it continues for several more weeks, it could put some farmers out of business completely. Not good. Let’s pray it goes away soon, in the same way we view Covid.
We know that vets do everything in their power to keep animals healthy and safe, and that is as it should be.
Even Vets Can Have Problems
However, even vets can have problems in the same way that animals do, and that is that they can get sick. OK, not in the same way in most instances, but nonetheless they can suffer from illness. They can also suffer from accidents. Let’s face it: a vet out on the road travelling to a local farm stands a lot more chance of being involved in an accident than the sheep in the field that he is going to visit! They are out there grazing without a care in the world, whereas who knows whether a ten-ton truck is around the next bend with the driver texting his girlfriend on his mobile?
So, when you run a veterinary practice, of whatever type, there is always the chance that one of your partners can suffer from illness or accident – and so can your front-line staff. Something could happen to your receptionist who knows about animals that puts her out of the office for several weeks.
Either way, the chance is always there. And if one of your partners in your practice is off work for several weeks, or one of your nurses or other front-line staff, it can mean that it can have a serious effect on your business overall. Not to mention the effect it can have on the animals that you care for.
Of course, there is an answer when these things happen, and it is a case of hiring a stand-in to take over the work that your partner or other practice member would normally do. That way, you can keep your practice running and look after your “patients” in the usual way.
The problem is that a stand-in – or locum – doesn’t come cheap. Oh yes, there are fully qualified vets who undertake locum work, but they are not cheap. That is why they do it in the first place. They can earn more as a locum than they would do working in a local practice, and it is you who is going to pay for it if you want to keep your practice up and running.
This is why you need to invest in the vets locum insurance that we provide at Approachable Locum Insurance.
Our vets locum insurance will cover all those extra costs of hiring a locum to work for your practice in order to keep safe and happy all your clients, pets, farmers, sheep, cattle, and so on – which in turn will ensure that your practice keeps on doing the same turnover – and at the end of the day, your profits will be where they should be, without involving you in the enormous extra costs that you would otherwise have to pay.
