Canberra’s pet owners deserve to feel confident about the veterinary industry and the regulation of it when they invest so much love and money into their animals.
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Pets are a treasured and often pampered member of the family and owners rely on vets to help when things go wrong or to carry out routine procedures with success.
Sunday Canberra Times recently revealed that 39 veterinarians had had complaints levelled against them in the past five years but just one had their licence suspended in the past seven years.
Complaints take many months to finalise and often lead to unsatisfactory outcomes for affected pet owners.
The current system has even been labelled by the ACT government as “overly complicated and at times caused significant delays in reaching resolutions”.
New legislation to improve the efficiency and management of the existing complaints resolution system in the territory is welcome.
An important component of this is allowing the Veterinary Surgeons Board - the body that regulates veterinary practice in the ACT - to suspend licenses.
At the moment the board has to refer complaints to a professional standards panel to impose conditions or disciplinary measures.
Pet owners have expressed dissatisfaction with the time taken for complaints to proceed through the system and the lack of discipline measures handed down when they have alleged malpractice.
The two who shared their stories in the Sunday Canberra Times present a warning to other pet owners in the territory.
Their call for the new system to include making complaints and findings more transparent is understandable.
If a vet is found to have caused the death or serious injury of an animal through malpractice and has faced discipline as a result then this should be information the public can access.
But we should be careful about making complaints public before they have been investigated by the board.
Not all complaints made by pet owners would be as a result of malpractice. Genuine mistakes do happen in industries where human error comes into play.
Reform is certainly needed in the sector and the new legislation will go some way to achieving it.
But protections for Canberra’s pet owners are an important component and so transparency in the complaints resolution system is a must.
