Outback Vets by Annabelle Brayley

Author:Annabelle Brayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743485651
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Not long before Red Dog died, Rick built his first vet hospital in Karratha. By the end of 1980 he had two vets working there. Christine and the three girls were living with him, and Louisa, Edmund, Samuel and Julia arrived over the next few years, bringing their tally to seven.

As their expanding brood of children grew up and went to the local primary school, Rick built or purchased practices in Port Hedland, Newman and Tom Price and installed vets in them as quickly as possible. With an eye to the future, in 1982, he also bought a practice at Victoria Park in Perth, which he still owns and behind which his head office is located. Naturally acquisitive, Rick’s never been able to resist purchasing real estate. He thinks it’s because his father was a son of the Depression who told Rick stories of his own father’s history in impoverished northern England. Rick never wanted to face that so he expanded his business base to ensure his family’s financial security. He says he took a few risks along the way but they paid off in spades.

Timing helped. Business boomed in the north, where the abundance of disposable income reflected the growing success of the mining industry. Rick spent most of his time on the road between the practices, still providing a service to remote communities and stations and zipping up and down to Perth as required.

When Sally reached high-school age, Rick and Christine moved to Albany, down at the other end of the state, where Rick had spent so many of his formative years. He promptly opened a vet practice there that he still owns, then bought a small farm and enjoyed giving his children a similar childhood experience to his own.

Working on the premise that he couldn’t control a practice from a distance, Rick devised a formula to run his remote practices viably. He gives his staff financial incentives in the form of a percentage of practice turnover – 18 per cent for vets and 10 per cent for vet nurses. It only succeeds if the staff work together as a team, as it doesn’t recognise individual effort. Rick says it does encourage team spirit though he admits there have been a couple of occasions when it didn’t work because of the makeup of the people involved, but he’s continued to apply the formula across the years, generally with success. ‘Ideally,’ Rick says, ‘you should make some profit if the other percentages are what they should be. Contrary to popular belief though, most vet practices are not very profitable.’ While his individual practices make decisions about pro-bono work themselves, staff do understand that it impacts on their overall turnover and, therefore, on their income. ‘The bottom line is that vets are running businesses; they have to make a living like everyone else,’ Rick says.

Then there’s the issue of maintaining veterinary services outside urban and large regional areas. ‘There’s no real incentive for anyone to go and live and work in the outback.

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