UC Davis veterinary workers fight for animal patients
By Sheri Williams
Union workers at the University of California Davis William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital are continuing informational pickets to raise awareness about staffing levels and other issues that the union said could endanger animal safety at the nationally-renowned facility.
“Enough is enough—chronic short staffing at UC Davis’ top-ranked VMTH puts animal patients at risk,” the union said in an online post.
The hospital is ranked as one of the country’s best veterinary facilities and offers specialty care available at few other places.
“Yet due to a severe recurrent and retention crisis, the hospital’s animal health technicians and animal technologists often cannot give animals—or their worried human companions—the attention they deserve,” the union said.
The hospital is staffed by members of University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119 (UPTE CWA 9119) professionals, where they help to treat more than 50,000 animals a year. While the hospital treats the usual cats and dogs, it also offers care for horses, livestock and exotic animals as well as running a 24/7 emergency clinic. However, UPTE says that pay lags behind for workers at the hospital, despite the need the facility fills. Other hospitals pay up to $15 per hour more, it said, “making it challenging for VMTH to hire and retain talent.”
The union said this pay disparity is impacting care.
“Key areas, such as the Small Animal ICU and Recovery Ward, often have only two technicians for over sixty patients; emergencies are turned away, and staff report preventable tragedies,” the union said on its website. “Burned out technicians say they wouldn’t board their own pets overnight. While still delivering skilled, compassionate care, workers are urging management to reduce turnover, expedite hiring, establish equitable salaries and career paths, and implement differential pay for weekends and holidays to stabilize staffing.”
“When I have a high caseload, even if they aren’t particularly critical cases or ones that need a lot of care, it’s just really hard to keep up,” said Gemma Blumenshine, an Animal Health Technician. “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. Even though this is an animal veterinary hospital, it is very much still a hospital, and my department 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.”
The union is fighting for safe staffing ratios, market-rate wages, better hiring for skilled employees and investments in retention.
“World-class veterinary medicine depends on skilled, stable teams,” the union said on its website. “By treating our technicians as the professionals they are, UC Davis can once again set the gold standard—for the good of every animal that passes through its doors and for the families who love them.”