Who is Vetbulance Community Care
Vetbulance Community Care is a benefit corporation offering low-cost, incremental, and inclusive small animal urgent care. Dr. Serena Nayee, Kiyomi Beach, and Paul Stringfield founded Vetbulance Community Care.
Who is Vetbulance Community Care?
As a public benefit corporation, our bylaws include a public benefit provision that honors our mission, vision, and commitment to affordable urgent care.
Our Mission
Our mission is to enhance inclusive access to urgent clinical education and care within communities while simultaneously creating early entrepreneurship and leadership opportunities for underrepresented veterinary professionals.
Our Vision
Our vision is to increase access to care by closing the urgent care gap and building trust with communities.
We do this by supporting underrepresented veterinarians who reflect the community and partnering with mission-aligned, low-cost primary care veterinary clinics across the country.
About Us
Vetbulance stands out due to its unique community-based approach to enhancing accessible illness care, education, and inclusive entrepreneurship opportunities at the intersection of both marginalized veterinary professionals and pet parent communities. Our proposed model is to partner with organizations with existing infrastructure to offer accessible preventive care services and supplement them with low-cost urgent care during afternoon, evening, and weekend hours in socially vulnerable communities. This model not only expands access by offering extended hours of service and more care options but also creates a referral system to connect patients with our partnered primary care practices, fostering relationships with their designated ‘regular’ veterinarians.
We partner with primary care veterinarians by co-locating to expand access to care in communities with limited access to care. This allows us to utilize present resources to reduce environmental and economic impact while enhancing equitable social and health impact and rapid expansion of collaborative care across the Southeast region of the United States.
Why Affordable Urgent Care Now?
Improving access to veterinary care is a growing nationwide movement, but efforts to bridge the gap in urgent and emergency care often lag behind those addressing primary care disparities. Many pet owners, especially those from marginalized communities, lack a regular primary care veterinarian and only seek services if their pet is sick due to a lack of accessibility and trust. Inclusive urgent care options can help build trust in a community by partnering with primary care providers.
Despite being the primary choice for many pet owners, there exists a large and growing gap in access to sick and urgent care when needed. This lack of accessibility is due to both cost constraints and a lack of information, preventing people from seeking urgent care for their pets even when necessary.
Urgent care conditions are considered non-life-threatening conditions that require immediate attention. Studies show that, due to accessibility challenges, half of the pet-owning population experiencing urgent/emergent needs do not seek care. When pet parents delay care, the problems worsen, and by the time they seek veterinary care, the issue may be life-threatening or prohibitively expensive to treat. Unfortunately, this situation frequently leads to pet surrender, premature pet mortality, or, in the worst cases, economic euthanasia. While efforts to ensure preventative care and education are widely available, it is evident that we need to do better to provide access to urgent care and education.
The shortage of veterinarians widens this gap by increasing the cost of veterinary care, which higher-income pet parents are able to absorb. This leaves us with a growing number of under-invested communities and a shortage of veterinarians focused on community medicine, especially urgent care. Our model addresses both issues by using existing infrastructure to expand access to care and providing compelling support and entrepreneurship opportunities for underrepresented veterinarians.
The solution is needed now to both increase the supply of veterinarians in community-focused urgent care and expand offerings for urgent care that build trust among pet owners within marginalized communities. Without immediate action, this gap will continue to grow.