Chapter 6 Conclusions
United States Government Accountability Office
Veterinarians are a small but vital part of the federal workforce, playing important roles in protecting people from zoonotic and foodborne diseases, ensuring the health and humane treatment of food animals, and helping to keep America's food system safe.
The nation is facing a growing shortage of veterinarians, and component agencies and other federal entities have already identified insufficiencies in their veterinarian workforces. At FSIS, for example, the veterinarian workforce is finding it difficult to adequately carry out its responsibilities for ensuring food safety and the humane treatment of animals. In 2004, we recommended that FSIS periodically assess whether it has enough inspection resources, including veterinarians, dedicated to humane handling and slaughter activities, but the agency has yet to demonstrate that they have done so. Nor has the federal government conducted the broader assessments and planning activities necessary to address veterinarian workforce problems at FSIS and beyond. Unless USDA and HHS conduct departmentwide assessments of their veterinarian workforces, they will not fully understand the size and nature of the challenges they face in recruiting and retaining veterinarians with the appropriate skills. This will leave their component agencies without a high-level solution to problems they have so far been unable to solve on their own. Moreover, without a governmentwide effort to identify shortcomings in veterinarian capabilities, the federal government may be missing opportunities to find common solutions for attracting veterinarians into federal service.In addition, unless component agencies complete and test their pandemic plans in keeping with FEMA guidance, they will not be fully prepared to carry out essential veterinarian functions in the face of high rates of absenteeism.
Until USDA details how responders would control a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak using vaccines, the nation will not have a complete understanding of the veterinarian workforce needed to control such an outbreak. Similarly, until more information is gathered on the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in wildlife, agencies will not be able to more accurately model the number and type of veterinarians that would be needed if the disease were to spread beyond livestock. Failure to understand the workforce needed during a catastrophic event—whether a pandemic or an attack on the food supply— could unnecessarily increase the scope and severity of the crisis. Finally, unless component agencies involved in responding to outbreaks of zoonotic disease regularly review their own performance and collectively assess opportunities for improvement, they cannot be assured they are using veterinarians as efficiently as possible. They are, therefore, more likely to face an insufficient veterinarian workforce capacity during future outbreaks, which may cause an unnecessary increase in the severity of the outbreaks and worsen the threat to public health.
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- APPENDIX I PERSONAL CONCLUSIONS (1ST EDITION, 2001)
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