As pet health care shortage drags on, two veterinarians team up to help in Renton

RENTON, Wash. — Two women veterinarians are working to tackle the shortage in pet health care, a problem that worsened during the pandemic. Even though the pandemic is starting to ease, the pet boom and industry staffing challenges mean pet owners are still struggling to find care for their pets.

Now two long-time friends and veterinarians have teamed up to take action, opening up a pet clinic in Renton dedicated to urgent care to help fix the problem.

The new space is called Arrow Animal Urgent Care.

A line of about a half-dozen pet owners waited outside their door when KIRO 7 was there in early March.

“He has a little eye infection,” said Riley Tamblyn, about his 8-month old pup Yoshi.

“I tried to get into a bunch of clinics yesterday. There was a six-hour wait at one and I called a bunch of others and they’re all booked out two, three weeks,” Tamblyn said.

Finally, Tamblyn found Arrow Animal Urgent Care and was outside waiting, hoping to get in. Other pets waiting for help included a dog who was shaking and unable to urinate for two days, a dog with a UTI, a cat scratching her head raw, and a dog whose owner said the pup was just not himself.

“It’s frustrating but what do you do? He needs his eye looked at. So there’s not really another way to go about it,” Tamblyn said.

The owners of the new clinic are veterinarians, Beth Guerra and Laurie Wieringa. The clinic opened on January 22 and the vets say they got slammed from day one.

“There was a line of people out the door, with no advertising whatsoever,” Guerra said. They say the line of people waiting happens every day, sometimes with up to 10 or 15 people in line.

Part of the problem is the sheer number of new pets. The ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Animals) says more than 23 million American households — nearly 1 in 5 nationwide — adopted a pet during the pandemic.

As an emergency vet before opening their clinic, Guerra said the sheer volume of sick pets trying to get into the ER meant they had to turn sick animals away.

For example, here’s how hard it can be just to get common problems like infections treated.

“The ER is saying for an ear infection this isn’t ER worthy,” Guerra said. “Even now we have clients who say I’ve called multiple ERs within a 30-mile radius so — like Kirkland to Tacoma — and being told you can’t be seen here, you can’t be seen here. We’re at capacity. We have no more cages in the ICU,” Guerra said.

But patients also can’t get urgent appointments to see their pet’s regular vet. Wieringa was a veterinarian at a day practice before opening up Arrow Animal Urgent Care.

“We get call after call and we can’t get them in. And we’re already adding extra appointments, drop-offs, and staying late,” she said.

It means sometimes, pets end up getting much sicker.

“By the time they got to the ER and were sick enough to be admitted, they were very critically ill. So at that point your options are, admit to the hospital and do all these things or sometimes consider euthanasia,” Guerra said. “It’s heartbreaking, because they don’t have anywhere to go,” Guerra said.

Guerra and Wieringa are best friends from the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, and both separately ended up in Washington State.

“We’ve lived together, gone on vacations together, have been at each other’s weddings,” Guerra said.

For a few years now, they’ve talked about starting up a practice together. But when they saw the supply and demand problem up close — amplified by the pandemic — it spurred them to take action.

“When Beth and I get together and we talk about our day, we’re asking, where can these people go?” Wieringa said.

“From there it just kind of snowballed,” Guerra said. “We see 20 to 30 pets a day, seven days a week, that cannot be accommodated anywhere else. That’s a pretty big dent and we’re proud of that,” Guerra said.

The urgent care is a space where desperate pet owners can help their furry friends before it becomes a life-or-death situation.

“I think this is a new niche we’ve found and I hope more of these models will open up just like it did in human medicine,” Guerra said. “It’s a general sigh of relief that they can get seen, which is really all we wanted to do,” she said.

Both vets recommend making sure your pets are up-to-date on preventative care, and both highly recommend every owner has pet health insurance.

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