By reaching all socioeconomic groups, a veterinary practice can gain a broader customer base and reap financial benefits. However, there are plenty of reasons beyond business gains to focus on serving your low-income community—reasons stemming from our Veterinarian’s Oath and veterinary ethics:

Veterinarians protect animal welfare.

In the Veterinarian’s Oath, we pledged to use our abilities for the “protection of animal health and welfare [and] the prevention and relief of animal suffering.” There are many pets our services do not currently reach, and restricted accessibility to veterinary care is a serious animal welfare issue. We should work to come up with strategies to provide at least basic care and staple preventions to these pets so that more costly emergencies can be avoided. Devising strategies to help with urgent and emergency care for these pets would be an even better goal. 

Veterinarians protect public health. 

The oath we committed to also says that we will work for “the promotion of public health.” By preventing zoonoses, we enhance public health. By reporting infectious and vector-borne disease data, we serve as sentinels for outbreaks. For our reporting to reflect public health risks accurately, veterinary care and diagnostics need to be widely accessible. We should also strive to make veterinary information and client education resources more visible and available to all socioeconomic levels. If we commit to serving our low-income communities by increasing access to care and increasing awareness through informational campaigns, veterinarians can continue to positively impact the burden of infectious diseases on public health.

Veterinarians protect the human-animal bond. 

Protecting animal welfare usually includes maintaining the human-animal bond, which is beneficial to pets and humans alike. Although there are exceptions in some extreme conditions, tremendous efforts should be made to preserve the human-animal bond regardless of the owner’s income or ease of paying veterinary bills. Furthermore, owning a pet is known to provide numerous and powerful health benefits; therefore, pet ownership contributes to community welfare, and denying these benefits to entire groups of people based solely on socioeconomics is inequitable.

Families undergo substantial stress when finances prevent them from seeking or receiving veterinary care for their beloved pet. By finding compassionate ways to work within the owners’ means and provide care, we serve more pets, defend public health, protect the human-animal bond, enhance community welfare, and reduce the number of pet relinquishments. We need to ensure our profession is serving more than just a fraction of society and work to remove the bias that exists regarding financial limitations.