Has your pet had some treatment recently and have you noticed on your vet bill an “injection fee”? Have you noticed you’re charged for the medication then an injection fee on top? Most practices these days will charge an injection fee to cover certain costs. Some practices may not charge them or may hide them in their pricing. Either way a practice is allowed to charge an injection fee and it will usually be for each injection given. So how do they come up with the amount to charge? Is it just a random cost? Well, there are few parts to this, let’s have a look at where the cost of the injection fee will come from.
Table of contents
Purchasing the needles and syringes
Needles and syringes don’t come for free. Imagine how much stock a veterinary practice will need – they see so many animals each day and most animals have at least an injection when they come in so that is a lot of stock! They are likely to buy them daily, or some may buy them in bulk. These days as times have changed and got better, we don’t have to reuse syringes. Back in the day some practices would be cleaning their syringes and sterilising them themselves! Sounds quite scary now but that is how they did it.
Luckily, we buy them in, already sterile, and throw them away. So how much are they to buy? Well, looking at a 2ml syringe and a standard needle for a box of 100 of each it is around £20, this will also depend on which supplier they use. Which doesn’t sound bad does it? But this is buying them at cost price. Part of the injection fee will have a small mark up to you as the owner to cover the cost of buying the needles and syringes and the delivery costs, plus of course VAT which puts 20% on top.
The administration
When preparing injections, we must do this in a sterile manner, for example swabbing the top of the bottle so no contamination can be passed onto your pet. Part of the fee also covers the products used for this. When administering medications we may need to wear PPE – for example gloves. This is to protect ourselves from any needle injuries and some of the medication we inject can be harmful if touched so wearing gloves is a must. Part of the injection fee will cover the PPE. Someone must pay for it at some point as even PPE doesn’t come for free.
Disposal
Once injections have been administered it is so important to dispose of the used needle and syringe appropriately so that no one gets hurt. When doing this there are some rules we have to follow for correct disposal – we cannot just chuck them into general waste, for example. Imagine if we did, there would be needle injuries galore and the landfill sites would be even more of a hazard! To dispose of them correctly we have two sharps’ bins. These often have different coloured lids, so we know which is which.
We have one that is for needles only and one that is for syringes and drug bottles only. A practice must pay for these bins and must pay for them to be disposed of correctly. They must be taken away by a particular company that specialises in waste disposal and be incinerated. This is part of where the injection fee comes from, and these bins don’t come cheap and neither does their disposal.
Professional time
The vet and the nurse need to be paid for their time – not just giving the injection (that would be covered in the consult fee) but the time taken to order and manage the stock, process the injection, and dispose of the waste.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter who administers the injection, a vet or a nurse there is still an injection fee. You are having a professional medicate your pet so part of the injection fee will have some of the vet or nurses time taken into consideration. We also must consider that it isn’t one injection dose that fits all, a vet must spend their time working out a dose for each injection. Some practices will differ with the cost of their injection fee, which is fine, there is not a standard one. We may see this as an unnecessary charge when looking at an invoice but when you think about what goes into preparing, administering and disposing of the injection it does soon mount up for the practice.
Discussion