***Thank you all for signing and sharing this petition so widely. Unfortunately, despite the 25,000+ signatures, the OVC Avian and Exotics Service will close as of August 6, 2022. Please see below for the Dean's response.***

Dear concerned OVC community members, including students, alumni and clients,

Thank you for your letter dated January 4, 2022, expressing your concerns about the College’s decision to discontinue the Avian and Exotics (A&E) service in OVC’s Health Sciences Centre (HSC) as of August 6, 2022. I have reviewed and reflected on your letter and the online petition, as well as other feedback I have received. I am grateful for the opportunity to expand on my previous message the OVC community explaining the rationale behind this decision.

As I outlined in my previous message, both staffing difficulties and financial constraints contributed to the decision to close A&E. However, I could have articulated more clearly the realities of the College’s financial circumstances and how these factors fit into the broader context of OVC’s clinical training program.

The University of Guelph and OVC, like most other educational institutions, have been faced with budgetary curtailment for many years. Certainly, since the 2014 report referenced in your letter, waning funds from the provincial government paired with tuition freezes for domestic students, decreased revenues throughout the pandemic, and various other financial pressures, mean that we have been forced to rely on reserves to maintain the training and care standards consistent with OVC’s reputation as a first-class institution. These reserves have been depleted, and so we must take further action to ensure we can continue to meet our commitments to students, faculty, staff and clients.

At OVC, we are lucky to have strong relationships with donors who contribute generously to capital projects (like the infrastructure upgrades within the HSC referenced in your letter). These fundraising campaigns have been effective in ensuring our facilities will continue to meet the standards necessary to maintain accreditation. However, fundraising is not a viable solution to resourcing challenges related to staffing (i.e. ensuring adequate faculty to staff a specialty service over a number of years).

Furthermore, this is not a discussion about the profitability of the A&E service; most services within the HSC are not profitable. Nor does this decision reflect a lack of appreciation for veterinary competency in treating non-conventional companion animals; I agree with you that there exists a need for interested student veterinarians to have an opportunity to receive clinical training with avian and exotic species in Ontario, including with falconry birds, large snakes, etc. Event still, after years of base budget erosion, this is a discussion about the need to prioritize and protect the core rotations at the heart of our clinical program.

The Avian and Exotics service is a primary care service that must offer case follow-up every day of the year. We recognize that our current staffing solution with one full-time clinician (following the departure of two other full-time clinicians in recent years) is not a reasonable or sustainable approach. Effectively maintaining this service, or indeed any primary care service, requires between 2 and 2.5 full-time clinicians, and unfortunately, this is economically beyond our reach when we consider the bigger picture within the HSC.

As a result of increasing caseload and teaching demands, and to maintain appropriate workloads for faculty (given service commitments, DVM teaching, research, and resident training needs), several demonstrated gaps already exist within Small Animal Internal Medicine (SAIM), Small Animal Surgery (SAS), Anesthesia, Large Animal Surgery (LAS), and Diagnostic Imaging (DI). There are gaps in other services that offer elective rotations, as well. As a result of insufficient faculty resources and the lack of availability of locums in a competitive job market, some of these services are already proposing to close for many weeks each year. This is an untenable situation; the closure of these core services would directly impact all DVM and DVSc students who receive training in the HSC and could compromise their ability to meet course requirements for graduation and certification.

We cannot compete with the private sector with respect to specialist compensation. Experience has shown that, to attract specialists to the university, we must offer tenure track positions in these critical areas to protect the sustainability of core services and rotations. As noted in your letter, we have a responsibility to provide reasonable and competitive compensation and benefits to HSC employees. Unfortunately, the positions in core services referenced above must take priority over the A&E resources given their required nature and more substantial role in training our students for day one competencies. Failure to protect core teaching capacity is the quickest route to the withdrawal of full accreditation.

Simply put at a time when financial and resourcing constraints exist across the board – constraints that could compromise our ability to deliver on our clinical curriculum - we believe we will be able to find alternative methods to deliver the A&E learning objectives more easily than we could deal with the closure of one of our core services. To maintain our standing as Canada's leading veterinary school, we must continue to excel in delivering our core mission. We cannot put all our services at risk in pursuit of the broadest and most varied clinical training opportunities; this would only serve to prolong issues that compromise not only our faculty and staff but also our student training.

I would like to reiterate that this decision was not made lightly, or without thorough exploration of alternative financial and operating solutions. The discussion about how to maintain this speciality service has been ongoing and evolving throughout my time as Dean, and I share your disappointment that we have not been able to find a sustainable solution. However, the current climate – characterised by historic workforce shortages, high demand for services, and the impacts of years of base budget erosion – has made it clear that discontinuing this service is a necessary step to protect the most core elements of our teaching program.

I understand the implications of this loss are wide-ranging and affect many other programs, including DVSc training. We will engage the services impacted by the A&E closure to identify solutions to ensure affected students and residents are able to accomplish program benchmarks. We remain committed to providing well-rounded education in veterinary medicine across species throughout all four Phases of the DVM program, and Phase 4 students who wish to pursue a rotation in Avian and Exotics will be supported to identify external sites for elective rotations in this area.

As we work towards building College revenues over the coming years using a variety of strategies, I do not predict erosion of any other clinical or diagnostic services.

Thank you again for sharing your concerns with me. In these extraordinarily challenging times, I am especially grateful for your passion and dedication to maintaining OVC's reputation for clinical and educational excellence.

Sincerely,

Jeff Wichtel
Dean, Ontario Veterinary College