Kudos to the Wellington Veterinary Clinic!

Kudos to the FDA for going to China, too. I'm surprised they're being allowed to inspect anything, though. Too bad it can't be an unannounced inspection, though, because I believe that's when problems can be identified (regardless of what country or industry it's in).

Congrats to Wellington!
I have a question for you about small town vets and emergency clinics. I live in Durango and the vets here take turns on weekends being "on call". They are, however, hard to get hold of. How do you guys do your emergency clinics being such a small town?

How does the AAHA assess the vet practice? Do they survey the practice or the clients? I can't imagine they can visit every practice. Does the practice submit a survey and the best get site visits?

However it's done - congrats to Wellington.

I go to an AAHA accredited veterinary practice today, and I have no reason to believe that the one you are discussing in your blog is anything but good. However, I have learned the hard way that AAHA accreditation is absolutely NO guarantee of quality care, and that AAHA accredited practices DO NOT have to maintain the quality standards that supposedly qualify them for accreditation.

My cat was given a massive insulin overdose by the veterinarian's son, a young man with NO formal veterinary training whose entire prior veterinary experience was serving as a "kennel assistant" while on school break. He can at best be described as an unlicensed assistant, and he was ROUTINELY, as a matter of standard business practice, left all alone unsupervised to tend to patients and boarders, including administering medications such as insulin with NO supervision. This was an AAHA accredited practice, and it REMAINED an AAHA accredited practice even after I sent AAHA a copy of the veterinary board action in which the veterinarian was fined for allowing an unlicensed person to provide veterinay care unsupervised by a licensed vet.

Each year I file FOIA requests for disciplinary records, and among them have been some of our most popular AAHA accrediated local practices.

While AAHA may educate veterinary practices regarding best practice -- and that is a good thing -- and while AAHA may encourage vets to provide standard of care -- and that is also a good thing -- I see no evidence that they enforce a requirement that their practices do so, and much evidence that they do not.

I also have attended our state vet boards meetings. At these meetings, the inspectors give their reports. One inspector told of a local practice whose "isolation room" was being used for food storage. When the inspector asked about this, she was told that they only have the room marked "isolation" for the benefit of AAHA inspectors, but that they do not in fact use it for isolation at all, but instead for storage.

They can get away with this, because all AAHA inspections are announced, which is pretty much a way for AAHA to give the practice plenty of notice to do things like put "isolation" signs on storage rooms and clear them out.

Why doesn't AAHA do unannounced inspections? I think it's because they realize if they did, they would find many of their practices would not be meeting the standards, and these practices after all PAY to be "accredited."

I am very angry with AAHA, because the practice that overdosed my cat had an audiotape running on their answering machine saying "Our practice is AAHA accredited which means that you know your pet is getting the highest quality care." This tape literally fooled me, it was one of the reasons I chose that practice. And my cat got horrifying "care" which was negligent in the extreme, not only overdosed but then left without treatment for the overdose for 24 hours. I daresay you would have to work HARD to find another practice locally, AAHA accredited or not, that would have provided such a level of NEGLIGENCE.

So, yeh, I go to an AAHA accredited practice today and I drive an hour to get ther, but NOT because they are AAHA accredited. Because they were executing business to a higher level of quality as a matter of business practice on their own, and they just happen to have AAHA accreditation, but it's irrelevent. What's relevant is that I know they have vets on the premises 24 hours a day and use LICENSED technicians only. These things go far beyond what AAHA accreditation requires, and I know from experience that AAHA has at least one of the WORST practices in the country among their ranks.

I do believe that those of us whose pets have been victim of negligence or malpractice might have a legitimate basis for a class action lawsuit against AAHA for false advertising. Not me -- my case is too old -- but as I said, the disciplinary records of boards around the country include AAHA practices who are violating standard of care. If AAHA wants we consumers to take its accreditation seriously, maybe IT should take it's own accreditaton seriously and YANK accreditation from practices who have been demonstrated to fail to uphold even the MINIMUM standards of care in their communities.