The veterinary community is changing. We are gradually moving towards a world of better work-life balance. Rotas vary massively from practice to practice, and even within practices, depending on particular species bias. One way some practices are adapting rotas is using a seven-day working week.
The knee-jerk reaction is often negative – especially when we consider the seven-day week in relation to the NHS. We’ve witnessed the junior doctor strikes to negotiate better contracts. No doubt, some of us have experienced the NHS staff squeeze first-hand, having been presented with long waiting lists for diagnostics or procedures.
Ludicrious?
With this in mind, the suggestion of a seven-day week for our human medical counterparts seemed ludicrous in the beginning – if staffing was an issue before, surely aiming to provide more services, such as routine procedures at the weekend, would only worsen the problem?
Be that as it may, the veterinary profession is not the NHS. We are more attributable to private medical services, where work-ups can be done immediately, results reviewed and treatments provided much faster. While we, too, are in the midst of an employment crisis, each practice varies wildly and some remain fully staffed.
Advantage
For adequately staffed practices, the seven-day week can, indeed, be implemented to everyone’s advantage. This doesn’t mean everyone works more, it just means the rota has to be managed differently.
An equine practice I’m aware of runs this rota. To my knowledge, the way it is implemented is some vets work alternate weeks – that is, seven days “on” and seven days “off” – while others work four days “on” and four days “off” in turn. Weekends are treated as a normal working day, so there are no more “weekends on call”, and the nights on duty are simply distributed within each vet’s working days. As you can appreciate, this means, for some staff, the days off are constantly shifting.
This is just one example of how the seven-day working week can be implemented, and, ultimately, results in more availability for clients and more time off for the vets. However, this sort of rota would not necessarily work in all practices or fit in with all lifestyles. The workload would have to be sufficient to make it economically viable to treat weekends as normal days and the staff would have to assess whether this sort of rota would work for them.
Work-life balance
Many people value the traditional weekend, because it fits with non-vet partners’ working weeks, family or other weekend commitments, which is the main barrier to the introduction of this sort of service on a nationwide scale.
The seven-day week doesn’t mean working seven days a week, every week. It simply means providing normal daytime services to the client seven days a week, with vets slotted into working hours accordingly.
In a stressful professional work environment – taking into consideration on-call work and the 5:30pm pyometra surgery that keeps you working well beyond your alleged finish time – forward-thinking practices should be allowing their “full-time” vets adequate downtime: be that time off in lieu, a four-day working week as standard, and flexible working patterns or shifts, opposed to the traditional 11-hour days. Numerous ways exist to implement a better work-life balance, with the seven-day week being one of them.
Retention solution?
With the staff retention problem in the profession, it is imperative those practices still dragging their heels and working their vets into the ground take on board these ideas, and change their rotas for the better.
Likewise, vets are struggling with their mind-bogglingly old-fashioned rotas should not stand for them – there are better options. If vets start voting with their feet, eventually, those workplaces stuck in the past, will have to adapt, otherwise they will find themselves even shorter of staff.
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