Vet's charges

[winkywinkola]

My lab had a weepy eye. Went to vet. Got drops. Suspected allergic reaction. £47 all in for five minutes and a wee bottle of drops. What i expected. Come back in a week, said the vet.

Today I go back. I'm in there literally 90 seconds. Vet checks eyes, all fine, bye. And they want another £21.50.

Am I being naive to feel conned by this further charge?

Follow up for medical care. Not an operation. If he had been in and had a wound stitched, and you went back to have the stitches out, you wouldn't be charged. Probably because you would have ALREADY paid for it. Ours are itemised on our accounts - post operative care appointments £xyz. Just becaue you don't pay on the day, it doesn't mean it is free.

But it was a follow up appointment. No more care or anything required.

So you've said. I'll not bother repeating myself again.

Sorry OP, YABU.

Like others have said, vets are highly trained professionals with a lot of training and high overheads. I don't think vets are generally raking in millions and are probably quite poorly paid compared to your average doctor or dentist.

Yes, some appointments seem very short, but that is balanced with those that are much longer.

My vets standard consult is about £20-30 (can't remember what) but they only charge this price for boosters as well, which includes the booster, and a health check.

If you are a regular at a particular vet, I find that you often get the odd freebie/charge waived too (I have had up to six cats of my own in the past). I once took a stray in and they removed stitches for free (she had been spayed and had old stitches still in her). I've also had another stray had fight injuries treated at a heavily discounted price.

If you are worried about the cost of vets fees, I strongly recommend that you get insurance. Yes you will pay an excess, but any fees will be capped at that level.

So if there is no further treatment you want to pay nothing - even though you received a qualified medical opinion.

If there was minor treatment, would you be willing to pay a small amount for the same opinion? Maybe 10 pounds for being advised to use antibiotics for a bit longer?

If there was major treatment, if the appointment's conclusion was that the dog required surgery, would you have been willing to pay a lot more for this opinion?

What would be the point of follow-up appointments if everyone knew in advance that all will be well? Clearly there was potential for complications with your dog's treatment which is why the vet wanted to see him again to check for those complications. You should just feel lucky there was no need for further treatment and consider getting insurance!

Iirc our vets standard consult fee is over £30.00 and they have a lower rate for second/third follow up consults - but - they use their discretion and if it was just a literally a couple of minutes to say everything was fine, they wouldn't usually charge. (However this could be because we have a longstanding relationship with them and have paid for ££££s of treatment over the years.)

The cost of follow-up appointments for procedures/ops such as stitching, wound-check etc is included in the initial procedure fee, so although it looks like there's no follow-up fee, in reality there is.

I know their consult fee is higher than other vets in the area, but my vet is fantastic, we're on the same wavelength and I trust her completely with my dogs. I'd rather pay a bit more for someone I can trust than save a few pounds and end up with substandard treatment. A good vet is worth their weight in gold, imo.

My current vets charges are in my opinion astronomical and having an old boy with cushings and constant anal gland issues I am constantly there so much that they all know my boys name and constant stream of nurses etc say hello to him!
The current vet charges for everything and that includes post op apps such as removing stitches.
I agree that you are paying to see a highly trained individual and my practise has fantastic facilities as it's a hospital, however they do charge excessively. My boys medication from them would cost me £60 for 2 weeks supply, online it costs £58 for a month. I accept that consultation fees etc are high (£48) but I think these days the expectation is that most owners have insurance (sadly not me) if big practises such as the one I go to we're more reasonable with their drug prices the consultation fees would be more acceptable.

Yes it is often the way you can get medications cheaper elsewhere other than from your practice. We tend to use an analogy that it almost like shopping at the corner shop, and shopping at Asda. Asda have much more breadth for storage, bulk buying etc and can pass the savings on to the customer. We (the corner shop) can only keep so much on the shelves, and therefore only buy in so much. A client recently came in for a prescription for some drugs that she could get cheaper online, than we could buy in from our wholesaler!

Follow up consult with hand surgeon. Do you have full use of hand? Yes.
Okay goodbye that'll be £120 Thank you.
I graduated the same time as my hand surgeon from the same university having studied for the same length of time. We have undertaken a similar amount of CPD, undertaken similar follow on examinations.
I charge £18 for my follow up consults he charges £120. His patients will not often bite or scratch him mine often do.

Aked I can understand the corner shop/asda comparison however the vet I use is a huge practice with full medical facilities with many vets consulting so is sort of the equivalent of a animal asda!
Lonecatwithkitten your post made me smile as an owner of a dog who has on occasions put in a sneaky nip to the vet although he never nips ladies!

I work in a huge practice with full medical facilities. We are not the equivalent of an animal asda, we don't have a warehouse in which to store a mountain of drugs!

I never thought about having to pay for a check up - as you say mostly only a minute or two! I just walk out afterwards as it never even occurred to me there would be a charge for that! I would ring them up and query it.

Mind you, over the 20 years we have been seeing the same vet practice the profession/technology/commercialism has changed massively! Good and bad.... they can do so much more now for your pets health, but it also seems to be also about selling the food, 2 tier pre-op bloods, join the 'healthy pet scheme' etc.

oh dear I'm showing my age now... !

Aked I'm not doubting you at all I am simply stating my opinion as a client at my practice who I still believe are extremely expensive for everything, however being a hospital there are staff there day and night which is why I continue to take my pets there.

Daisy perhaps you come to my practice :)

I am insured but little point in claiming for small amount.

I am insured but little point in claiming for small amount.

It's always the same in the service industry I think, whereas if you're selling products people accept that you have to buy the products to sell on to them. I run a business myself, so appreciate the charges made by vets ... as someone else said we're spoilt having the NHS for ourselves. But my OH has been waiting over a year for an operation ... my dogs go in the same day the problem is discovered!

But the point needs to be made - regardless of the length of the appointment, the minute you walk through the practice door, you are costing money to provide a service for. The PLI, the chairs in the waiting room, heating, lighting, cleaning, reception staff etc.

Once you go through to see the vet, they are putting their professional reputation on the line. That means if your dog has an eye problem, and they missed something serious, and your dog went blind, you would be entitled to make a complaint to their professional body, and in serious cases they can be disciplined and banned from practice. I can't emphasise this enough - it's great when you walk away from a vet's appointment with nothing wrong and no meds to take, but it's important to remember they are there to diagnose and treat serious illnesses.

The cost of these sorts of (very annoying!) appts which are just under the insurance claim threshold is one of the niggly joys of dog ownership, but it's unfair to blame the vet. Compared with other professionals, I think they are very reasonably priced.

The vet asked you to make a follow up appointment because they wanted to ensure the problem had responded to the treatment. Sadly, although vets have to spend huge amounts of capital on equipping their practices, that equipment doesn't generally include a crystal ball and therefore they have to rely on repeat examinations to determine whether a treatment is effective.

I am a vet and the longer I'm in practice the more careful I am to request reexaminations. This is because I'm constantly served reminders that owners often don't know the difference between minor problems and serious ones, and they can't be expected to know what response should be seen to each treatment etc. I've told people to ring and make an appointment if eye things haven't cleared up in a couple of days, and then eventually seen the poor animal a month later when it needs to have its eye removed because the problem has deteriorated. I've got a responsibility to ensure an animal is returned to health before "signing them off".

Unfortunately, because easily a quarter of my workload is reviewing existing conditions, I can't not charge. Could you work for free a quarter of the time? Postoperative checks are included in surgical fees but if your animal has a medical condition then I'm afraid it costs just as much for me to put aside that ten minutes to see it again as it does for the initial consultation. YABU I'm afraid.

Ah, the recheck fee. One of the great causes of bitching and moaning amongst clients. I notice that the OP didn't consider the charge for the initial consultation incredibly cheap for professional time. If we get enough people whinging about recheck fees, we'll make them free but increase the cost of the initial consult to a more realistic level in line with other private healthcare professionals.
Lots of sensible posts on this thread acknowledging the fact that, for example, stitch removal cost has been factored into the initial price of neuter surgery or whatever.
To the poster who thinks they just pay the cost of a vaccination at booster time - no you don't. Vaccines don't cost that much. You are paying for professional consult time.
If we run bloods, the cost isn't just the running cost of the lab machines. You're paying for all the training and experience that comes into play when we run our eye over the results, pick out what is a normal variation, what can be accounted for by age or medications or dehydration or stress or heart disease or body condition rather than disease of the organ system in question; what can be left and what needs followed upon; what could be a problem but the bloods won't show us. All this flicks through our minds before we ring you and we trot off to consult the textbooks if need be. Also, I guarantee 99.99% of vets are thinking "hmm how can I reach a firm diagnosis and prognosis as quickly, non-invasively and cheaply as possible for this owner" rather than "right, how much can I possibly screw out of this owner"

I used to work in a vets. We were told to try and sell the blood tests to every client.

In some vets there is some degree of "selling"

I am however very happy with the vets I use and It's not local but I still use it because I've always liked them.

They certainly have the feel of caring about the animals rather than trying to sell me stuff whic has happened before in other vets.

I once had to see a dermatologist privately for something which the NHS wouldn't pay for (unless it got infected and then would be an emergency ..). I went in, she looked at me for two mins, told me I really needed to see a surgeon as she couldn't help and charged me £350... I think my vet is remarkably cheap, considering ...

Giles I'm an employee so it makes no difference to me financially whether owners buy preop bloods. But I'd prefer it if everyone did because there are rare occasions when a previously apparently healthy animal develops organ failure after an operation, and you always wonder if bloods would have picked up an early indication so that you could have prevented it.

While our policy is to offer the option of blood tests rather than "sell" them, I don't necessarily think that it's bad practice to advocate gold standard services. Many people draw the comparison with human medicine, when we won't always have preop bloods done, but when you compare anaesthetic risk of animals to that of humans it is (while still small) significantly greater.

People's perception of these options varies hugely in my experience. Some owners are very reassured that we offer the service and are keen to do absolutely everything to maximise the chances of a good outcome. Some think we're on a money spinning quest and refuse outright even if I express concern for their pet's well-being. And some want it but can't afford it - and that's not my decision to mke, my job is just to ggive options and guidance.

I do resent the perception of vets as money grabbing. Healthcare is expensive. Professional services are expensive. And a quick look at any salary survey will show you that of all the professions veterinary medicine is poorly paid by comparison. I'm ten years qualified, I have to undertake constant expensive training, affiliation and insurance fees must paid each year so I can practice, and I still owe the student loans company nearly £20,000 - a slice of which comes out of my wages with tax every month. In the last year the practice i work for has invested around £30,000 in improving diagnostic equipment so that we can find out what's wrong with our patients quickly. I don't expect my boss to announce that we're going to charge less any time soon.

I do resent the perception of vets as money grabbing.

Me too, and I'm a VN. I have no vested interest in making money. We aren't pushed to sell anything at all, we just offer the best and it is up to the owner whether to take that choice or not.
It is wearing when you are doing your ultimate in your job, to have clients make the assumption you are doing it for the hard sell. That includes nutrition by the way, I have no reason to recommend a specific diet for your cat, other than knowing the benefit it has to offer. I make no money from your buying it, I just have your pets best interest at heart.