At the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, UPTE members are advocating for improved staffing and care
The Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital (VMTH) is an emergency facility that is open 24 hours a day to provide exceptional care to pets and animals. It is a hospital essentially made up of specialty clinics including internal medicine, ophthalmology, cardiology, dermatology, dentistry, and more. Thanks to the hard work of UPTE members, VMTH is often hailed as the leading veterinary medical hospital in the United States.
Workers at VMTH want to give every animal the skilled care, comfort, and attention they deserve but there are structural issues at work getting in the way. We have been calling on management to address a number issues including high levels of turnover, slow hiring processes, inequitable salaries, career parthways, and the need for weekend and holiday pay differentials to better incentivize filling these shifts.
Management has yet to take action around our concerns, so on October 18 members at VMTH spent time on their lunch break talking to students and clients outside of the hospital about their concerns. We asked members to support us by calling Mark Stetter, the Dean of Veterinary Medicine, and telling him that they stand with VMTH workers.
"When I have a high case load, even if they aren't particularly critical cases or ones that need a lot of care, it's just really hard to keep up. You want to be able to make sure that you're catching all of the little things with each individual patient, because it's so crucial that we chart everything. It's really difficult to keep up with the charting, the feeding, and making sure that you're catching anything unusual when you have such a large patient load," said Gemma Blumenshine, an Animal Health Technician at VMTH. "Even though this is an animal veterinary hospital, it is very much still a hospital and my department it is still very much an ICU. And so it would be really beneficial if we were able to get more support from the hospital to support us in this high level, high intensity critical care role."
Members are scheduled to sit down with management soon to discuss our demands. We look forward to working with the administration to continue building on the legacy of outstanding care we have historically provided at VMTH.
