Practice Profile: Bute and Cowal Vets

Staff: full-time vets 4 • veterinary nurses 4 • practice administrators 4

Fees: initial consult £28.80 • follow-up £20.70

The island of Bute may not be the liveliest place on the planet; there are no shopping centres or night clubs and cattle outnumber people three to one.

For Duncan MacIntyre, who has spent most of his career on this small fertile island in the Firth of Clyde, it’s a working life that’s delivered the kind of career fulfilment and satisfaction that many would envy.

And it would be a mistake to assume Duncan must have lived a frugal existence devoid of the finer things in life that are meant to come with practice ownership.

During the past four decades the practice has prospered, expanding to include another site on nearby Cowal and – despite having just four vets across both sites – the business turns over almost £1 million a year.

That’s not to say the occasional deserving client hasn’t been given the odd free consultation down the years, but for Duncan that’s what being at the heart of a small community is all about.

He explained: “I was brought up on a farm in Argyllshire and was worried about the future of small family farms.

“I graduated from the University of Glasgow School of Veterinary Medicine in 1974, having spent a lot of my student time seeing practice on the Isle of Bute. I liked it so much I watched the situations vacant sections in the vet press for about five years after I qualified to find a job there.

“Finally I got the chance to come back to the island when the practice advertised for a prospective partner. I took that job and went into partnership, and I’ve not looked back since. It’s been a great life both personally and professionally.

“For me, working within a defined community is important, but then I came from a village that had a population of about 30.

“I have always enjoyed being part of the community. You see all sides of practice life, you are not in a big city saying ‘our consultation fee is £45 and if you can’t afford that then go somewhere else’. You have to gear yourself to doing things for somebody that is going to pay you a fiver a week, but you know because they are a good egg and they have been in the community for so long that they will drop off their fiver a week or whatever until the bill is paid. In a city practice you can’t take risks like that – you have to be much more hard-nosed.”

Practice of the Year

Due to the difficulties recruiting and retaining vets at the practice, Duncan has spent many years working alone, including through the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Since 2003, however, he’s had daughter Catriona on hand to help and when the owner of a practice on the nearby Cowal peninsula decided to call it a day in 2008, the family firm – whose directors are Duncan, wife Linda and Catriona – saw their opportunity to expand, and Bute and Cowal Vets was born.

Duncan added: “We already had clients coming over from Cowal to see us, so we bought that practice, which my daughter now runs, and runs very well.

“The practice won the Petplan Practice of the Year award in 2015, and a lot of that is down to her hard work and input. The way it works is that I run the Bute site in Rothesay along with my assistant Beth Kean, who is an able and enthusiastic young vet, while Catriona and American vet Arwyn Schumacher run the practice in Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula.”

And it is in Dunoon that Duncan, Linda and Catriona are investing, with work now underway to move the surgery to the former town library building in the heart of Dunoon. The site was bought for £200,000 and Duncan estimates spending a similar sum to transform the 4,000 sq ft building into a modern veterinary practice.

Expansion plans

And it is with no small degree of excitement that Duncan lays out his plans for the new building, which is greatly needed as footfall at the existing Dunoon surgery has more than doubled in recent years.

He said: “The building is 100 feet long and 40 feet wide, and we are going to have a big reception area, with separate waiting areas for cats and dogs, and offices behind. There will be three consulting rooms, each with access to the pharmacy. Separate wards for dog and cat in-patients will be served by a dedicated animal kitchen. A small laboratory lies close to a preparation area serving two operating theatres.

“There will be a separate x-ray and ultrasound room and at the far end, plenty of space for a mortuary and large animal equipment. Provision of a staff kitchen/dining and rest area will be real luxury for Catriona and the team as the last site was very tight for space.

“It is a big investment for us with me being at this stage of my career, but I don’t think we have any alternative due to the massive increase in demand in recent years. This will be a really lovely premises, and somewhere our staff and clients can be really proud of.”

Duncan had hoped the work would be complete by Easter, but COVID-related delays mean the new surgery is likely to be opening its doors to the public for the first time in early summer. Currently, work is underway to install more than 1.8 kilometres of computer cabling, with points in every room in the practice in a bid to future-proof the building against any possible expansion in years to come.

Mixed bag

And it is clear that most future expansion is likely to come on the small animal side of the business, as Duncan explained: “The Bute practice has more farm work than the Cowal site does – we still have nine dairy farms here. Of course, that is a lot less than when I first came here when there were 34 dairy farms working, and while the number of dairy farms has dwindled, the number of cows has actually risen slightly.

“On an island that is 15 miles long and at the widest 4 miles wide we probably have about 15,000 cattle. That used to be half and half dairy and beef, but that is now a third dairy and two-thirds beef.

“We also have about 30,000 sheep on the island, but the sheep numbers vary because a lot of the hill farmers in Argyll with blackface sheep send wintering hoggs to the island over the winter to feed on good grass, but at the beginning of April they will be back to the hills.

“Cowal is not nearly such an intense area for livestock; there are no dairy farms left at all sadly. There is some beef and sheep; we have some quite sophisticated sheep farms breeding tups and doing embryo transplants – we don’t do the transplant itself, but we are often involved with the preparation.”

Overall, Bute is 40% small animal and 60% farm animal, while in Dunoon the split is closer to 80% small animal to 20% farm.

Retirement plans

But despite his ambitious plans, Duncan is well aware that the time to hang up his stethoscope is drawing ever closer. He said: “It is time I was doing less and I am really noticing the toll the years have taken on my body; I have regular physio on my shoulders after years of lambings and calvings. I know I can’t put retirement off forever.

“To complicate matters, when my wife Linda and I first moved here 40 years ago and bought our cottage, we wanted to produce milk for ourselves and our children. We bought a Dexter house cow and over the years that has grown into a herd of around 40. I would like to retire at some point so I can spend more time with my cattle and do justice to my role as president of the UK Dexter Cattle Society. We rent 100 acres to ensure the cows are all grass-fed – I do virtually all the work myself, including making hay and silage – so I would like to be able to step aside from vet practice at some point.”

But that is easier said than done in such a remote part of the world. Recruitment and retention is a massive issue for most veterinary practices, but for Duncan and the team at Bute and Cowal Vets, the problem of keeping vets and building succession into the business is not a new one.

He added: “We have had some great young vets here down the years and we have worked hard to develop those vets, and give them lots of support and a broad range of experience. But we find that we develop them and teach them to fly and, unfortunately, that is what they do – they fly off and that is one of our worries.

“I will be 71 in April and it is time for me to hang my boots up, but we are desperately short of vets. In Dunoon we have been relying on locum cover to keep us up to speed and that costs a lot of money – we could employ two assistants for every locum who we employ.

“I love the life, and the whole area is a lovely part of the world to live and work in, but recruiting and retaining vets is a real struggle.

“Maybe the young vets just want big cities and nightclubs, I don’t know; they won’t have that life here, but if it’s the open air life they want – walking, running and cycling – then this is the place to be. We even have the odd ceilidh to liven things up from time to time.”

Walk on the wild side

Most of the practice’s clients come from the Isle of Bute and the Cowal peninsula of Argyll, and Duncan doesn’t encourage anyone to come from further away because of out-of-hours obligations.

He said: “We have to do all our own OOH, and we have to have separate OOH cover for Bute and for Cowal because there is a stretch of water between the two, and the ferry stops at 9pm and doesn’t start until 6am the next morning.

“On call OOH seems to scare applicants, but it is not too onerous; you are not out half the night every night, you get a middle of the night call once in a blue moon, but we do get some evening calls.”

While OOH calls in the middle of the night from pet owners are fairly rare, calls concerning the local wildlife provide variety and are often more entertaining, too.

Duncan said: “I enjoy doing the wildlife work and while we don’t do anything sophisticated – immediate first aid or short-term treatment – that is what most wildlife stuff is. If you can’t get it right and release them fairly quickly then you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Catriona is a trained British Divers Marine Life Rescue “medic”, and has assisted with a number of cetacean strandings locally.

“We do get some interesting wildlife calls though; one of the most memorable was when we had someone call in at midnight about a baby seal – she was in a right panic about the fact it was stuck in the rocks and was trying to stand up, but couldn’t. I just explained a few points about the physiology of the seal and put the phone down, but that’s an extreme example. There are also reports of swans dropping out of the sky into the sea and we get the occasional report of guillemots described as penguins, despite being in the wrong hemisphere, but it is all part of the rich tapestry.”