Help! – Providing Emergency Funds for Emergency Treatment

Emergency veterinary care is about the last thing on any owner’s mind when they make the decision to purchase a pet. The veterinary industry has been doing its own thinking on preparing for the ever-threatening veterinary emergency.

The past few years have seen significant advances in the level of care available for clients and their pets. In the Melbourne metropolitan area, the number of fully staffed 24 hour and out-of-hours dedicated emergency centres has risen significantly, with no pet owner being more than 20 minutes from a dedicated emergency centre within the metropolitan area.

Not surprisingly, the lengths that clients will go to for their four-legged family members has more than kept pace with the service advances vets have been able to provide, reinforcing the anecdotal evidence that pets are indeed a key part of today’s family. However, as these services become available, the cost of provision of more advanced and comprehensive care rises, and as we all know, the rainy-day piggy bank may not provide the funds at hand to meet diagnostic and treatment costs.

In parallel with these advances, has been the decline of the practise of keeping accounts. This has been a natural progression, as on-hand pre-arranged credit is appropriately used to meet treatment costs, rather than expecting the practitioner to provide a banking service as well as a veterinary service. In keeping with this trend, a quiet credit revolution is sweeping through the veterinary industry as heavyweight credit providers such as GE Money enter the market.

Historically credit applications had taken days to be scrutinised and approved, despite the fact that emergency treatment hinged on a decision often made in a matter of minutes. The traditional method for many vets was to trust the client and take care of the details later, leading to inevitable bad debt, souring of relations with clients and discounting of charges while attempting to provide top level service. None of these phenomena were ideal for the client or allowed the vet to do their job well, resulting in frustrated clients and practitioners, even when treatment had gone to plan.

Over the past year the incidence of credit plans such as GE Money CareCredit have enabled progressive veterinary practices to provide secured credit, at almost no notice, to clients with solid credit histories. The advent of web-based application systems now means that in less than 15 minutes a practitioner can have an answer on whether secured credit is available for a given client. The vet can then commence treatment and concentrate on doing the best job possible with both the client and vet having peace of mind that funds will be provided in due course.

This has provided a number of significant benefits to the veterinary industry for both the client and the vet. Firstly, vets using such credit facilities are finding that their bad debt levels are being cut dramatically, but more importantly, the quality of treatment is increasing, translating to better outcomes for all concerned.

If you are a vet or a pet owner wishing to know more about CareCredit, please feel free to contact us at the Centre on (03) 9532 5261, or GE Money CareCredit on 1300 662 273.

The Southern Animal Referral Centre was the first veterinary practice in Australia to use GE Money CareCredit, and regularly offers this service to their clients to meet life-saving treatment costs while providing clients with 3-12 months to meet their financial commitments. All credit is subject to approval. Surcharges apply.

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