Secret shopper study finds uneven access to vet appointments: full analysis

Can pet parents actually get a veterinary appointment? A new secret shopper study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association offers a more measured answer than the profession’s shortage narrative might suggest: usually yes, at least for routine puppy preventive care, but with meaningful gaps. Researchers reached out to 5,053 general practices across six states and secured appointments in 67.0% of attempts, while the remaining failures were driven mostly by communication barriers, including inability to connect with staff and excessive hold times. (researchgate.net)

The study arrives after several years of intense debate over veterinary access, pandemic-era overload, and whether the profession is facing a broad companion animal workforce shortage or a more uneven distribution problem. AVMA has argued that current strain is real but concentrated in certain geographies and sectors, including rural practice, emergency care, food animal medicine, and public health, rather than representing a uniform shortage across all companion animal settings. Its 2025 economic report also shows how uneven the workforce remains geographically, with suburban practice locations dominating and rural access continuing to be a live concern. (avma.org)

Methodologically, the paper used a realistic first-visit scenario: callers posing as dog owners with a new puppy searched for the nearest clinic from assigned home addresses, then called to establish care and book initial vaccines. As author Simon Haeder explained in AVMA’s Veterinary Vertex podcast, the secret shopper approach is useful because it tries to capture what clients actually experience in real time, rather than relying only on recall-based surveys. The fieldwork ran from February 4 through April 11, 2025, in California, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. According to the study abstract, appointment failures were most often operational, not clinical: 15.1% of attempts failed because callers couldn’t connect with staff, 8.2% because of excessive hold times, and just 1.9% because staff refused the appointment. Contact information errors appeared in 2.2% of cases. (researchgate.net, buzzsprout.com)

The rural pattern is where the findings sharpen. In the Veterinary Vertex podcast tied to the paper, Haeder said rural callers had a somewhat harder time getting appointments, waited a bit longer, and on average faced roughly 15 to 17 additional minutes of driving time. He also emphasized that averages can mask the most affected outliers, including pet parents facing 50- to 100-minute drives or waits of 40 to 60 days. That distinction matters: the typical experience may be manageable, while a smaller subset of communities still functions much more like a care desert. (buzzsprout.com)

There’s also a broader access backdrop here. In the podcast, Haeder framed the work as part of a larger effort to understand whether people can get care for their pets when they need it, borrowing methods long used in human health services research but still relatively underused in veterinary medicine. Separate 2025 survey research in Frontiers in Veterinary Science found that more than 20% of care-seekers reported difficulty getting an appointment, and the authors linked those barriers to downstream issues including dissatisfaction, stress, and possible erosion of trust. In Colorado policy research, cost remained the most common reason pet parents reported giving up a pet, underscoring that availability is only one dimension of access. Together, those findings suggest the new secret shopper paper is helpful, but it doesn’t close the case on veterinary access. It mainly tells us that for a routine dog wellness request, many practices are reachable, though not all communities are equally served. (frontiersin.org, buzzsprout.com)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the practical takeaway may be less about adding exam slots and more about tightening the path into the practice. If one in four failed attempts came from no connection or long hold times, then phone systems, staffing models, callback workflows, online booking, and triage protocols become access tools, not just administrative details. The study also gives clinics a more nuanced message for clients and policymakers: access problems are real, but they may be driven as much by rural distribution and operational friction as by a universal lack of veterinarians. And because the study used a secret shopper design, it offers a closer look at real-world client experience than many perception-based surveys can. (researchgate.net, buzzsprout.com)

What to watch: The next important question is whether these results hold for urgent or sick-pet visits, other species, and lower-income or more remote households. The authors and related researchers have already pointed toward broader questions around quality, trust, affordability, and whether alternative care models such as telemedicine could ease barriers in underserved areas. Expect future work to focus less on whether access exists in the average case, and more on which patients and communities are still falling through the cracks, especially the outliers hidden behind reassuring averages. (frontiersin.org, buzzsprout.com)