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10 15 24 Dumb Friends League CEO Dr Apryl Steele on support for Colo Proposition 129
It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre base stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! I bet you're smart. Yeah, and you like to hold your own in the group chat. We can help you drop even more knowledge. My name is Martine Powers, and I'm Ella Heiizati. We host a daily news podcast called Post Reports. Every weekday afternoon, Post Reports takes you inside an important and interesting story with the kind of reporting that you can only get from the Washington Post. You can listen to Post Reports wherever you get your podcasts. Go find it now and hit follow. Make this season brighter with Vizio's 75-inch Quantum Pro TV, now $200 off at Walmart. This premium QLED smart TV delivers breathtaking brightness and lifelike color that brings every holiday movie to life. The Quantum Pro features wide viewing angle and anti-glare film, so everyone at your gatherings gets the perfect view. No matter where they sit, with built-in apps like iHeartRadio ready to go, you can stream your favorite holiday music right out of the box. Save $200 on the 75-inch Vizio Quantum Pro smart TV at Walmart today. Colorado voters will have a say over how veterinary care is managed in the state where a new type of career path could be created within the industry should proposition 129. That's what it will look like on your ballot be approved. The measure would create what it's called a veterinary professional associate, which is being compared to a physician's assistant in human medicine. Joining us now on the K-way common-spirit health hotline to talk more about it is the president and CEO for the Dumb Friends League. It's Dr. April Steele. Dr. Steele, thank you so much for your time this morning. Good morning. Thank you. Walk us through a little bit of why the Dumb Friends League is in support of Proposition 129 and what it would mean, what it would look like for voters if passed. Great. So the Dumb Friends League's mission is to prevent homelessness and animal suffering. We know there's no bigger risk to animal suffering than the lack of veterinary care because of our workforce shortage. We see every day at our subsidized veterinary hospital people coming in with animals that are going to die that day or be severely in severe pain if we can't serve them. And by 8 a.m., we're turning people away because there's just not enough resource to serve people that animals that need care. So this is a legacy issue for the Dumb Friends League and other animal welfare organizations in Colorado. The system is not working and we have to do better in veterinary medicine and I am a veterinarian. So I know this well. We have an associate's two-year degree for technicians and then we have an eight-plus year degree for doctors of veterinary medicine and nothing in between. So this ballot measure would create a master's degree level professional, kind of think of a mid-level professional or a PA in human medicine that would work alongside a veterinarian as supervised by that veterinarian but able to increase our opportunity to provide care for sick and injured animals. When it comes to animal care, Dr. I always resort to my alma mater, Colorado State University, one of the elite vet schools and I saw in their survey when I was doing some due diligence, the fact that one in three people and you've kind of alluded to this have experienced barriers to accessing veterinary care and is that just simply finding a point person to care for their pet? Yeah, it's a lot of things and I agree as a CSU graduate it's an awesome veterinary school and that's where the master's degree program is going to be offered. In their survey, not only is it, sometimes if they can't afford veterinary care because it's gone up so much recently and these are family members, it's not a luxury, it's a life or death situation, sometimes they can't get an appointment, veterinarians aren't accepting new clients, there are many counties in Colorado that don't even have a veterinarian so it's all kinds of access issues and the system's just broken and we need to fix it. The other really sad statistic is three-fourths of veterinarians say that they have to make economic decisions to euthanize a pet even though they have the ability to cure it just because of the financial situation of the owner which is so sad considering we're healers. Dr. Steele and you know very well that Coloradans really love their four-legged friends, they treat them like family, they spend sometimes more time on their vet bills than they do their own personal health but so the opposition of this is a lot of people say, well, we think it's not enough work, it's not enough experience in order to take care of my pets, it's irresponsible by knowing that they'll be performing surgery with minimal training, what would be your response to that? Yeah, you know, I'm so sad and it's the trade business organizations that like the current system and want to protect the current system and about two and a half million dollars have been put in by the National Trade Association to fight death and the messaging they resonated when they tested it was that this would be dangerous for pets but the reality is this is a robust master's degree program at the veterinary school at CSU which is the second best veterinary school in the country, it's five semesters, there's over almost 400 hours of in-person labs and an internship so they are going to be overseen by the same state board of veterinary medicine that veterinarians are and held to the exact same standard of care as veterinarians so it's hard to see how that would put animals at risk. Doctor, when we talk about this and Geno alluded to, if you want to say the experience that the folks have when dealing with pets, you talk about the system being broken, is the system broken because the barriers of getting accepted do vet school, the cost associated with that? How would you, this is something to help assist the system but how would you from your opinion fix the system top down to where there's greater accessibility and greater practitioners in this field to help people with their pets? Yeah, you know it's a great question and there were over 3,000 applicants to CSU's veterinary school for 150 seats last year so it's not a lack of interest for people that want to go into the profession. I will say that it is a very expensive training and the cost of the tuition compared to the cost of the first year salary is not good and so it's a very difficult place for people that don't have considerable financial resources to enter into this field. The other thing that we need to think about is veterinary technicians are the core of what we do and they're so important but they have an average career span of 7 years because they have no career path and to give them a career path like a PA is something that could really keep them in the field. If you think about human medicine, PA's are critical to our healthcare system and yes we need a lot of doctors and they need doctors to run, you know, to be able to defer to and to do the complex situations but if we didn't have PA's in human medicine we've been a really bad place in our country. Dr. Steele in wrapping up with you, it's approved how quickly would we see VPA's at our vet facilities taking care of our pets. I mean when would the course open and when would people graduate and actually be fully immersed in Colorado veterinary clinics? Yeah, it's going to take a while, this is the long look, right? So CSU is going through their final approval for their master's degree program. If everything goes the way they expected to they would start their first class in fall of 2025 and so in spring of 27 they'd be having those graduates who could then be deployed into practices. So we're looking a couple of years down the road but we know the system needs a lot of help and we have to do something to the infrastructure so we have to do something now to get that going. President and CEO for the Dumb Friends League, Dr. April Steele, thank you, Dr. Thank you both. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV is giving you access to holiday music and genre based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. Go stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. 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