A novel workload calculator for the veterinary sector

Introduction

Veterinary profession is among the old professions known and practiced by man (Johnes, 2021; Mark, 2020) [4,6] . Veterinarians are the assurers of animal health, animal welfare, Food safety as well as the prevention of zoonotic diseases. However, despite the spread of emerging and zoonotic diseases and the growing number of animals and the related services, there is a lack of accurate and instantaneous update of the number of veterinarians in the globe. The last available statistics are dated more than 20 years ago whereat the number of the veterinarians was estimated to be more than 600,000 over the world (Kouba, 2005) [5] . Recently, several countries have begun visualizing the veterinary sector data and implementing targeted measures to address the identified gaps. In Europe, there are over 300,000 veterinarians, however in 2024, the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe (FVE) highlighted a concerning trend as all available indicators, despite the absence of a comprehensive analysis, revealed a growing shortage in the veterinary workforce across most of the European countries (FVE, 2024) [2] . In contrast to Europe, the United States maintains detailed annual statistics on its veterinary workforce. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the number of veterinarians in the U.S. reached 130,415 in 2024 (AVMA, 2024) [1] . Furthermore, the use of different methodologies of workforce analysis is a common practice in businesses. While various sectors used Full-Time Equivalence (FTE) methodology for workforce analysis, such as healthcare (Nurok et al., 2024) [7] , logistics (Wicaksono and Fadillah, 2021) [10] and engineering (Rachmuddin et al. 2021) [8] , such analytical tool was not used in the veterinary sector. Moreover, addressing veterinary workforce challenges requires not only accurate data and analysis but also strategic collaboration between public institutions, private sector, and educational bodies to ensure sustainable staffing and future readiness, therefore, the objective of the current paper is to develop a workload calculator that could easily be modified and adopted by official authorities as well as the private sector to analyze the workload of the business and long-term workforce planning in the veterinary sector.

Materials and Methods

Daily practitioner activities

The daily activities of a veterinary practitioner vary significantly depending on the species treated, their population density, geographical location, season, practice specialty, and the epidemiological status of the area. Based on the author's experience, ten routine activities were defined and are briefly described in Table 1. Activities related to disease outbreak response were excluded, as they are not considered routine. In livestock practices, most cases are treated on farms or animal holdings, which are often widely dispersed. For the development of the current workload calculator, an average of 80 kilometers covered in an hour of driving is considered reasonable. [9] was used. Practitioners from two veterinary clinics were requested to estimate the EFT for selected ten routine activities. The time required by the assistants or support staff to prepare animals or materials was excluded from these estimates. Table 2 presents the Earliest Finish Time EFT values for the ten defined daily tasks, which serve as the foundation for the Developed workload analysis calculator.

Working Hours

Official holidays vary across countries, and annual leave entitlements can differ between male and female employees within the same organizational grade. Therefore, for the purpose of developing the current workload calculator, the assumptions outlined in Table 3 were used to estimate the official working hours per day, month, and year based on the Gregorian calendar. [3] as shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Workload interpretation as per the full time equivalent results

Full Time Equivalent Result Workload FTE > 1.28 overload 1.00 < FTE ≤ 1.28 normal FTE < 1.00 under load

Number of practitioner's activities in a month

The activities of two practitioners in two different practices with different specialties were reported for one Gregorian calendar month. The first practitioner who was a specialist in reproduction applied hormonal treatment to synchronized 939 ewes for estrus and performed 39 minor surgeries as well as examined 39 male and female camels for reproductive disorders, whereas the second practitioner treated 15 herds with a total number of 579 animals. The distance travelled by the two practitioners was not recorded. Table 5 presents the details of the two practitioners

Results and Discussions

The aim of the current paper is to develop a workload calculator that could easily and effectively be used to calculate the workload for veterinary practices over the world. The variable attributes of the calculator are the daily activities a practitioner veterinarian performs in any veterinary practice.

To demonstrate its functionality, the calculator was applied to two practitioners, and the results are presented in Table 6.

Conclusion

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first documented application of the Full Time Equivalents FTE methodology to calculate the workload of veterinary practitioners. The findings demonstrate the applicability and flexibility of the workload calculator in assessing existing practices. It can be concluded that with minor adjustments to its parameters, the calculator can be effectively used for long-term workforce planning not only in the veterinary sector but also in other industries where task-based staffing is essential planning new veterinary businesses.

Conflict of Interest Not available

Financial Support

References

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