What are the arguments against adding a mid-level position or do you have a source I could read more about it? I don't know much about what this would entail and I'm interested in how this could affect the profession.
Reasons why midlevels are bad:
1. They have destroyed human medicine. Ask most MDs and DOs and they will tell you to try as best you can to avoid them.
2. Vet med is shoved into 4 years, it really could easily be double that length, we barely scratch the surface of medicine in vet med during our training. We already learn a ton of breadth with very little depth as our basic veterinary school training. There is no way to truncate this.
3. Midlevels are trained to follow flow charts more or less. If something is "off" they don't have the training/knowledge/experience to pick up on that right off.
4. Animals are masters at hiding serious medical issues, it takes a lot of training to start picking up on the more subtle cues and indications that something is very wrong. Something that can't be taught in 2 years, really hard to even teach in the current 4 years.
The education/cost issue:
1. As mentioned above how do you truncate down an already very broad veterinary education from 4 years to 2 years?
2. The education won't be that much shorter, you still have to take all the same pre-reqs, it only shaves off 2 years of vet school.
3. The cost, the current estimated cost for tuition they are suggest for veterinary mid-level courses is insane. It will still cost 150Kish to become a veterinary mid-level
4. There isn't that big of a gap between vet tech pay and DVM pay, what exactly are they planning on paying a mid-level? Will this be a salared position or an hourly position?
The biggest reasons are the finanical ones.
Coporate medicine LOVES the idea of a veterinary mid-level. Why? Money.
A veterinary mid-level will make less money than a DVM.
They can replace veterinarians with mid-levels and only have to hire a few veterinarians to "supervise" the mid-levels.
Having worked for corporate, they will 100% have mid-levels working while there are no veterinarians on premise to "superivse", they will expect you to be able to "supervise" on your day off aka "well you can review what they did when you come in the next day".
This will effectively make it so that veterinarians are pushed toward specialization because the "mid-levels" will be doing all the GP jobs and it will be harder to actually find a job as a GP veterinarian. Most veterinarians still go into vet school because they want to be GPS, they want to give vaccines, see puppies/kittens, create the life-long relationship with a client. Removing this from veterinarians will actually have more vets leaving the field.
Legal issues/things that matter as the DVM dealing with mid-levels:
1. There is currently no developed licensing for a veterinary mid-level
2. There is no currently developed liability for a veterinary mid-level, the current proposed recommendation is that the supervising DVM be responsible. That means any errors, mistakes, etc made by a veterinary mid-level would fall onto the supervising DVM. If you think practicing medicine is stressful, try being responsible for the medicine you practice AND the medicine someone else practices on an animal that you have not physically seen/touched, depending on how the corporation/clinic allows the dice to roll. Even if you are in the building you don't have time to see ALL of your patients/cases AND put hands on ALL of the mid-levels patients/cases.
3. Even in human medicine if a mid-level makes an error or causes your death your recourse is minimal you have to go after the "supervising" MD/DO even in states where mid-levels have been given autonomy to practice alone. Still doesn't matter, you have minimal to no recourse.
And finally as
@Trilt stated, we have severly underutilized and underpaid our veterinary technician staff.
There is zero reason for a veterinary mid-level when we are still not utilizing our veterinary technician staff to their full abilities. Another aspect on this is the absolute zero consistency in veterinary technician licensing across the country. Also we have got to STOP hiring veterinary assistants and end "veterinary assistant" schools. Assistants are often utilized in some clinics as "on the job trained technicians" we have to become serious on that a vet tech is a very specfic position in the clinic, with schooling, licensing, etc and that we have to stop yanking high school kids off the street and plopping them into the clinic as "veterinary assistants" and pretending they are anything equivalent to a trained and licensed vet tech.
Also, there are already veterinary technician specialty licenses as well that I don't think get discussed about/utilized near as much as they should be.
I could probably keep going but I will stop here.
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