Today I have left my vets.

B

BBH

Well-Known Member
Joined
26 April 2007
Messages
9,357
Visit site
I am so upset with my vet and have been feeling over charged for a while.

Yesterday was the last straw and I am moving which is a shame as the practice is close by and I have been a loyal customer for years.

My dog has been having weekly visits for a small eye ulcer and whilst checking the other eye discovered he produces no tears.

Each week I have had 2 ointments and a rebooking for the next week to check progress .

The problem is that before my last visit I was sent a link from the vet offering his eye cream at £24,60 . So when I checked my bills I have been charged £77.44.

I expect a mark up but not in the region of £50 for a tiny 3kg tube.

I rang the practise to see if there had been a mistake . No she said it's correct and because online have no overheads and we have a hospital to pay for. We can write you a private subscription for £18 and you can get it from us online. Er no we don't tell you that unless you ask . But how do we know you have that service if you don't promote or offer it ? Well you don't , it's really only for people who complain .
I've cancelled his next visit and I need to find a new vet. I fully accept a mark up but I'm feeling ripped off.
 
Well done - more of us should refuse to accept shoddy/expensive service. I changed mine when I had a lovely Springerr who developed megaesophagus. Previous vets treated her grudgingly, basically they were waiting for her to deteriorate so they could PTS, I emailed a lot of local ones to ask if they had any experience with the condition and the other local one replied that they currently had two. With their help she had another 12 months of reasonable quality of life, but it felt so disloyal moving after many many years, even though the old one had let me down.
Slightly at a tangent, neighbour had a dog with tear duct problems (along with diarrhea and itchy skin) and the local pet shop owner suggested grain free food - it worked really well and very quickly. Worth a try?
 
since my vet sold his practice to a Group their charges have gone up . Problem is the other vets in town all belong to groups now so point in changing!
 
Snuffles said:
since my vet sold his practice to a Group their charges have gone up . Problem is the other vets in town all belong to groups now so point in changing!
Click to expand...

Check who is running the vets day to day. For example vets for pets managers (head vet) will have a stake in the practise so in their interests to keep profits high. Other groups will do not require all practises to stick to their higher costs, a benefit of being in a group is that the practises can afford better treatment options, further training and more up to date a equipment...It's not all doom and gloom!

A usual mark up is 50% for vets, so if it is more than double the online price I would certainly query it. However they are often stuck with a certain supplier so the mark up on their drugs may differ.
 
I think you'll struggle to find a vets that don't do this tbh. I have a prescription for my dogs tablets. They were £1.80 each from the vet and 69p each online! Bad enough , but it's the same parent company! (CVS). I've recently had the same with her other medicine. £55 from vets and £23 online.

I really feel for people that don't know this. I wonder how many animals have actually been pts because the owners don't know and can't afford the vets prices. Would the vet tell them I wonder?
 
We're looking at doing the same, been with the practise since it opened but prices have gotten ridiculous.
£140 charge for tablets that are £55 online for our old boy who will be on them for the forseeable. Oh and berating an elderly woman in front of the waiting room in front of clients for a mistake they'd made and charging her £35 to clip 2 claws. Made the dog bleed and now poor thing has a complex about her feet and thats before all their equine mess ups recently.
 
It would be the same at our practice - I can't order it from the wholesaler at the price it's offered at some online pharmacies, we'd be out of pocket before we even started (guessing it's Optimmune). And it's very true that the online pharmacy hasn't a fraction of the overheads of a practice. One is there in the middle of the night when your pet needs life-saving surgery, one is not.

That said, we do have the written prescription policy and charges clearly displayed in reception, and there's ways and means of explaining things with tact and consideration (i.e not as bluntly as I just have above :p)

Don't start me on CVS!
 
madamebonnie said:
Bit of an assumption that vets are heartless S**Ts.
Click to expand...
It wasn't an assumption at all, but just a musing really. Certainly me own vet would have told me. He's probably not the most profitable they have as he doesn't seem at all concerned with making money, unlike some of the other vets at the practice who recommend every diagnostic procedure going for the simplest things.

Go on Blackcob - dish the dirt on CVS! ;)
 
Oh b****ger mine is CVS now. If I want to change how easy is it to get your animals notes changed over ?
 
Last edited:
It has got to feel bad when it is CVS's own online pharmacy offering it so much cheaper though! So as a group they are buying it cheaper than the c. £25 pharmacy price and then selling it for 3x that in practice.
 
I got the written prescription some years ago, but I'm sorry, the vet took the p i s s asking for £10 for that! There was no way I was going to pay what he wanted for the meds. It was a small practice and when he spoke about sending off a sample when one dog had a gloopy eye (hello chlorophenicol at a couple of quid in Asda), we left. Sad, after 13 years with him, but we're now at a big commercial, fairly impersonal practice which the horse has always been at, so it's quick, pushy with wanting us to use their food (no thanks!) but competitively priced and appointments are always available.
 
That is a fairly steep markup, and I am definitely not the biggest fan of CVS and most corporate practices in general.

BUT I also have to defend vet prices a bit too: as blackcob points out, that markup is paying for someone to answer the phone to you in the middle of the night. For the 5+ years of expensive training that allowed the vet to diagnose your dog with dry eye. An online pharmacy has virtually no overheads. In general, vets do not charge anywhere near what we should for professional fees (i.e. we should charge more per hour than lawyers, plumbers etc etc but we don't) therefore drug markups tend to be where most of the money is made that then pays the vets, nurses, reception staff, equipment, electricity bills, building rent. Online places sell the drugs cheaper than we can buy them wholesale. As for prescription charges, how much would a lawyer charge to look over something and write a letter for example? Checking prescriptions is a time consuming job - a lot of vets end up doing this in their lunch break or those precious free moments between consults. Would you expect to call a lawyer and ask for a letter and them to do it for free? Now, I am the biggest bleeding heart ever and will never be able to own my own practice because I would bankrupt myself giving stuff away cheap, however I also have spent most of my life studying and have huge debts and actually, my expertise should be worth a lot of money. No other service industry does things for free.

So in short, try ringing the online pharmacy for advice at 3am before giving us vets too much of a hard time. The majority of us just want to save animals! ;-)
 
I agree with Murphy and Blackcob. My vets are wonderful and always there, 24/7/365. My dogs get the best care in a nice, clean hospital. OK they do have one snotty receptionist but the rest are lovely.
I have never requested a prescription to use elsewhere, possibly I would if it was a really long term and expensive requirement.
(Mine are an old established practice, not a group).
 
I don't believe a visit to a vet is cheaper than a plumber. I pay nearly £40 for 5 minutes of my vets time, that's £480 per hour! I'm sure lawyers charge more, but that really is an industry where charges are ludicrous. My OH is self employed. He is considered an expert in his field and there's one thing that he's the best in the country at and gets called to when all others have failed. He wouldn't have any work if he charged £480 per hour! His knowledge has taken many, many years to acquire and he's had a lot of formal training too which obviously costs. I think the difference is that he works commercially, rather than for the general public. Companies have to be mindful of costs as all times and would just find someone a bit cheaper that could do almost as good a job. My local vet has newly qualified vets that charge the same as the practice manager and as we love our animals we feel obliged to pay it and there's very little choice if you want the best for them.
 
Well said Murphy88.

People often assume that these huge mark ups are just lining pockets. Sometimes they are in fact paying staff wages (which aren't great, but if you studied for years to be a vet, a VN - did lots of CPD every year etc, wouldn't you want your wage to show this as a staff member? Sadly they aren't always high paid). And then there is the purchase of new equipment, whether it's a new dental machine (the one in our practice is constantly being repaired!) or imaging equipment? A new anaesthetic machine? None of this stuff is cheap. Ok, you might find other practices are MUCH cheaper, MUCH lower markup, but perhaps they are not keeping up with the latest new equipment, don't send their staff to congress etc. But the ones that do, are you glad of it when your pet is in their hands?
 
If your vet visits are only 5 minutes that is really tight. Don't forget though that not all will be that quick, I have never been in less than 5 minutes I don't think, and the next person isn't in there immediately as they have to write up notes and clean up. So max takings would be £240, and I imagine that is pushing it. They are also paying a nurse, a receptionist and almost certainly others out of that.
 
I know of so many people who haven't replaced their pets because they felt ripped off by vets fees.....even those that can easily afford to pay. Most would like to have replaced them, but feel it would be stupid to put themselves into that position again.

Our village used to be full of dogs....now it's rare to see one.

If the bottom falls out of the market, what will all these companies like CVS do?...realise their assets and push off?
 
meleeka said:
I don't believe a visit to a vet is cheaper than a plumber. I pay nearly £40 for 5 minutes of my vets time, that's £480 per hour!
Click to expand...

that wouldnt be 24/7 though or even working hours in a day. there has always been a massive mark up on SA meds but at least the choice for a prescription is now there.my husband is also very well paid contractor (he earns a lot more probably than most vets and for less hours) and he's not running a practice whereby he has employees, partners and is having to update equipment.

At my old equine practice when my horse needed very expensive meds they offered me a prescription so that I could get it much cheaper.

I think the OP's vet practice should have been more forthcoming about the prescription thing, I actually thought they were required to put a notice up or give you the choice. I am lucky in that I have quite a large choice of practices and the one I've chosen is very anti-corporate, do their own OOH and have a mission statement of keeping costs affordable. Its not a flash hospital however, though I do have three of those not far away.
 
All our local small animal vets are CVS, or companion care, as is our local hospital, so I don't have much choice sadly. Our local farm vet is independent and much cheaper so I believe it can be done.
 
was too late to edit post so:


Having read the CVS accounts it is worrying, I never thought the corporate practice thing was a good idea-I know someone recently on here told me why it was but I can't remember! if choice is being taken away then that isnt good-lucky to have choices up here.

My vets is a real mixed practice-I am in a relatively poor rural area. but in such practices the SA side has always propped up the LA and to a lesser extent any horse work that they do. Practices back in the early 90s when I started vet nursing carried a lot of customer debt-even the big ones, that wasnt fair either.
 
My vet is in the CVs group .
I might gulp when a I get the bill but no more so than before they became cvs and I now have options to reduce the costs that reward loyalty which I did not have before.
The animals get fantastic care from very good vets .
No where else near here has the facilities to care for a very badly injured horse and when one of mine was found immobile in terrible pain I was very glad that he was less than twenty minutes from such a good horse hospital .
But my choice is all about the trust and relationship I have with the vets coupled with the facilities to do the job in an emergency .
When I need a vet I know I will get one fast that can't be said for the smaller practises .
 
I don't think anyone doubts that you are getting a lot more from your vets than you do an online pharmacy. To me it would make more sense as a business model now that online pharmacies exist and people will use them to get people to pay for that service from charges for services not extortionate mark ups on drugs.

BUT when your vet has their own online pharmacy as part of the company that will provide the drug at a third of the cost?? People seemed to have missed that it was because of an email from the practice that the OP found out, so not a separate totally third party pharmacy? Or if they haven't missed it am I the only one that would find that smart a bit more?
 
ester said:
I don't think anyone doubts that you are getting a lot more from your vets than you do an online pharmacy. To me it would make more sense as a business model now that online pharmacies exist and people will use them to get people to pay for that service from charges for services not extortionate mark ups on drugs.

BUT when your vet has their own online pharmacy as part of the company that will provide the drug at a third of the cost?? People seemed to have missed that it was because of an email from the practice that the OP found out, so not a separate totally third party pharmacy? Or if they haven't missed it am I the only one that would find that smart a bit more?
Click to expand...

It's my choice to pick up the drugs and walk out of the surgery I could do different but I don't .
It's a different service and it has a different price ATM the drugs hold down the costs of seeing the vets the other model would be higher call out and consultation prices and cheaper drugs .
I have plenty of choice for small animals in my local town it's not like I am forced to go anywhere .
 
Of course it is a choice? I don't see where I wrote that people were forced to take medications from the vet or how it was part of the point I was making?
 
I left my equine vet recently. A new vet they hired screwed up when euthanising an elderly mare of mine. Needless to say I have no interest in giving them further business.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top