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Photo by Wes Naman

From left, Drs. Julia Donnelly, Sonja Sims and Nicole Chamney opened their own emergency veterinary hospital in Santa Fe in August, bringing the statewide tally of 24/7 hospitals to two.

Late last year, when relief emergency veterinarian Dr. Julia Donnelly sat down to plan her 2024 schedule, she felt what she describes as "a wave of not-quite guilt, but sadness." The Santa Fe, New Mexico, resident had plenty of contracts and she loved relief work. What bothered her was having to travel out of state to practice emergency medicine because closer to home there was only one 24/7 hospital.

"I think I'm a pretty good ER vet," she said, "and this is my hometown and my home state. Why should I go to these other places and sell my services … when my community is so desperate and so in need of these things?"

Out of that nugget of discontent sprang Mosaic Animal Emergency and Specialty Hospital in Santa Fe, opened in August by Donnelly and two other veterinarians.

New Mexico's other around-the-clock ER is also a relative newcomer: Roadrunner Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Hospital, located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, opened in March 2022.

The two hospitals are more than sole providers of consistent all-hours veterinary service for the entire state. As independently owned ERs, they also represent a reversal of a recent trend toward corporate consolidation of emergency hospitals.

"Most of the practices here in New Mexico were privately owned," Donnelly said of the pre-pandemic era. "Then a whole bunch of different corporations came through. It really disrupted a lot of the older clinics that have been here for generations."

Now, she said, those acquired practices are struggling.

The first big hit to the state's emergency veterinary services came in 2019 when Pathway Vet Alliance, now Thrive Pet Healthcare, purchased Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Care. The long-established and locally owned practice had locations in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Pathway closed the Santa Fe location in 2020 due to pandemic-related staffing shortages, according to a Thrive spokesperson. Eventually, the hours at the Albuquerque location were curtailed due to insufficient staff.

New Mexico's two other emergency hospitals, both in Albuquerque — VCA Veterinary Care Animal Hospital and Referral Center and Route 66 Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Center — have also reduced hours in recent years because of staffing shortages. VCA is owned by Mars Inc., a global conglomerate. And Route 66 is partly owned by Ethos Veterinary Health, which, in turn, is owned by the international consolidator National Veterinary Associates.

'I can open it myself'

New Mexico native and Roadrunner founder Dr. Ashlee Andrews was the first to enter the breach. Early in the pandemic, Andrews, who owned four general practices in Albuquerque, witnessed owners with very sick animals with no place to go.

"Anytime we had a critical patient, we had to do a call-around game," she said. On many occasions, no ER was open or able to admit patients. In those cases, a veterinarian at one of the general practices provided emergency treatment and monitored seriously ill or injured animals overnight.

By late 2021, "it really came to a head," she said. Providing critical interventions placed too great a burden on the general practices, and too many pet owners didn't have reliable emergency service.

"I thought, 'I've been an ER vet. I can open one myself,' " Andrews said, adding, "I'm not sure I ever dreamed of owning an emergency clinic, but we felt an obligation to the community."

Her biggest worry was attracting and retaining staff needed for an emergency hospital. So, she leaned into incentives, including fully paid medical insurance, 401(k)s with a 100% employer match up to 4% and employing a full-time counselor to support staff mental health. She also said that being locally owned by a single veterinarian has proven to be a draw.

In addition, her general practices — she now owns five — are a boon. When she needs extra people power in the ER, staff from the general practices pitch in.

Since opening, Roadrunner has never closed, according to Andrews.

The hospital is located in Algodones, a small town 25 miles north of Albuquerque and 45 miles south of Santa Fe, in the former home of a Thrive-owned neurology clinic. Next year, Roadrunner will move to a new 13,000-square-foot building in Albuquerque.

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Art by Tamara Rees

New Mexico is a geographically large and sparsely populated state. Roughly half of its two million residents live in and around Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos.

'This is our community'

Mosaic's role in filling a service void has a particularly literal manifestation. Donnelly and her partners, Drs. Nicole Chamney and Sonja Sims, purchased a 16,000-square-foot building that housed the former emergency hospital in Santa Fe, which sat empty for almost five years.

Donnelly said Mosaic is an opportunity to do things differently from corporate and private-equity-backed practices like the one it replaced.

"We don't have to send money back to the mother ship," Donnelly said, explaining that their low overhead and independence make them free to set their own course.

A 2013 veterinary school graduate, Donnelly experienced burnout early in her career while working at a bustling urgent care clinic in Colorado. It's one reason she shifted to relief practice for a time. Now, she wants to create a business that avoids putting other practitioners and support staff in a similar bind.

As examples of this effort, she cited simple measures, like no one clocks out for lunch — "we just truly want you to sit down and have a lunch, and that shouldn't affect you financially" — and more significant initiatives, such as eliminating production-based pay for doctors and implementing profit-sharing for the entire staff.

"I think, my generation of vets, we need to stand and say, 'This is our profession; this is our community,' " Donnelly said. " 'If we don't like the way things are, we have the power to change them.' It's scary, though."

Even as these new hospitals promise to help pets in crisis, Jared Lyons is flagging another access-to-care concern in the state: the looming retirement of baby boomer practitioners. Lyons is a veterinary hospital administrator and co-founder of Turquoise Trail Veterinary Urgent Care, which opens in Santa Fe this week.

Researching his startup, Lyons said he and his partners visited nearly every animal hospital between Santa Fe and the Colorado border. Most were single-doctor, owner-operator, mixed animal, partly mobile practices.

"They serve huge chunks of the state, land-area wise," he said. The practitioners "are getting older, and they cannot, for the life of them, find anybody else who wants to come in to help run or help own those practices."

While folks in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area recently have struggled to "access care at 2:36 a.m. on a Saturday," they aren't having trouble getting routine preventive care for their pets, Lyons said. However, in the foreseeable future, he warned, "People legitimately are one retirement away from just nothing."