Open Letter
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January 22, 2021
To: Professor John Fazakerley, Professor Anna Meredith, Professor Josh Slater
Dear Professors,
The University of Melbourne’s U-Vet Werribee Animal Hospital is one of Australia’s leading veterinary hospital facilities. We, the staff of U-Vet care for over 25,000 animals each year and train the next generation of veterinarians and veterinary specialists with the assistance of academic and professional staff. We are honoured to serve our Werribee community.
This is why we are extremely disappointed that our University leadership has not been clear and transparent about the job cuts occurring and that have occurred under the “Pandemic Reset Program” and their impact to staff, students and our community.
Throughout the pandemic (including during the strictest Stage 4 restrictions), U-Vet staff continued to come into the Hospital every day to keep it operating. We did this within the confines of the strict Victorian Government Health advice for social distancing and room occupancy. We continued to keep seeing the sick and caring for the injured patients. We continued to see the emergency cases, continued with patient medical and surgical treatment. On top of the worsening COVID situation in Victoria, U-Vet also found the strength to pivot swiftly to online learning for the veterinary students. If it were not for the dedication and commitment of our staff, graduation for the 2020 cohort of veterinary students would not be possible.
We did this through a management directed "COVID restructure" that saw our previous systems of management and reporting dismantled. Despite meetings with various representatives from the Hospital personnel about how to proceed during the rapidly evolving COVID situation, none of the ideas were constructively heard. As a result, a drastic reduction in staffing ensued; at the apparent behest of the University not extending contracts even as we became busier and busier, reducing our capacity to take non-urgent cases.
Our professional staff losses already in 2020 have led to a loss of approximately 30 professional staff who were skilled in their area, these losses through attrition, completed contracts, extended leave and resignation.
The University's Pandemic Reset Program proposals do not recognise the correlation between skilled professional staff and teaching in a hospital that provides a high standard of care and the provision of high quality teaching, support and safe operations.
This brings us to the current change proposal under consultation until 31 January 2021. Our key concerns with your proposal to cut even more staff includes:
Detrimental impact to research and teaching opportunities by reduced caseload, loss of skilled professional staff to assist and provide support.
Reduction of research opportunities for U-Vet residents through a lack of cases, support and overwork as they try to respond to the loss of skilled staff.
Reduction in cases and opportunities for final year vet students and clinical residents to gain hands-on practical experiences and ‘Day One’ clinical skills with animals during their time within U-Vet Hospital
Risk of losing international accreditation as a veterinary training institution if the hospital no longer offers 24 hour emergency care, with a negative impact on training of emergency specialists.
Tarnished reputation and services within our Werribee community due to the lack of services in training and patient care. We are no longer able to adequately provide 24 hour support for local and referring veterinary clinics. There are community generated petitions requesting that the public maintain access to U-Vet out of hours as they have for the last 30 years
Extreme workloads being normalised. As pointed out in a Town Hall with staff, caseload numbers of the Hospital remained on par with 2019 with fewer staff for the COVID operations.
Staff re-assigned without consideration of field specific specialisation - a potential OHS issue.
We also question the necessity of the job cuts when the Hospital was understaffed before the pandemic even began. The incidence of workplace injuries at Werribee has been high, resulting in an improvement notice in 2018-19, which was resolved in 2019. The investigation found that most injuries were the result of perceived urgency when staff levels were low, reduced communication and planning when dealing with heavy workloads, staff communication of risk, staff training in safe handling of animals, some equipment deficits, and staff identifying risk and proceeding anyway due to time constraints. All these findings point to a workforce being placed under extreme pressure.
The Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences’ vision is “to be the best higher education institute in Australia, and one of the finest in the world, in agriculture, food and veterinary sciences.” (FVAS Vision and Strategy 2017-2025). It is difficult to see how it will be possible to “achieve and sustain this through excellent staff and student support” if our staff – the workhorses, lifeblood, experience and intellectual wealth of our faculty – remain under stress from the ongoing uncertainty of job insecurity, under pressure from unmanaged workload burdens and under threat from enforced budget cuts – whose aims are focused not on excellent staff and student support, but on returning to an operating surplus by 2022.
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