Horse Healthcare in Maine
Equine large animal veterinarians and their call radius within the state of Maine
Dr. Bretz doing a lameness exam on Vinni the Minni at Days End Farm Horse Rescue
I have always been interested in animals and have recently thought about going to vet school. With the thoughts of vet school, I kept hearing about how there are fewer and fewer vets in rural areas and more of a lack of vets for large animals. I recently did an internship at Days End Farm Horse Rescue in Maryland. One of the vets for the farm kept trying to convince another vet that had done the equine track in school to join their practice. Although she had done an equine track in vet school, she was working at a small animal clinic because it had better pay and hours.
The USDA reported a shortage of veterinarians in at least 500 counties spanning 44 states. This shortage is mostly in rural areas and therefore has a larger effect on large animals and livestock. American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) reported that only 10% of graduates had an interest in working with livestock.
For this project, I decided to look into how horses and horse owners in my home state of Maine could be impacted by this shortage of large animal veterinarians.
The blue map is the population of horses and the red map shows the population of humans in the same geographic areas. If you click on the round icon in the bottom left of the map, the legend will become visible.
This map shows the call radius of the large animal vets in the state of Maine. You can interact with the map!
How I Made This Map
The information I started with was a spreadsheet from the state of Maine including farm animal veterinarians dated 2019. Lots of this data wasn't pertinent to this project so of the original 30 vet offices there are 23 included in this map. The Seven were removed for various reasons including not taking new clients, not treating horses, or because I was unable to reach them after multiple attempts. The vet offices were able to be matched to addresses within ArcGIS pro, so I did not have to mess with that data, except to make sure the correct ones got removed.
There were many hours dedicated to getting the farm call coverage to look the way I wanted it to.
I had to call all of the vet offices to ask how far they would go for a farm call. At many of the places I called the vets are getting older, so they are traveling less or have stopped altogether. As I called the veterinarians, the information got added to the spreadsheet. After a group of the information was in the spreadsheet, I could start manually entering the data in ArcGIS Business Analyst . I had the locations of all of the vet offices already on the map and when I clicked on them one of the options is 'create buffers'. Once that was clicked, the pop-up would look like the image below.
The next step was to put in the correct information by deleting the numbers in those fields, and put in the correct distance or time depending on the vet. Resulting in the image below with only one colored shape on the map.
I then had to Continue to do this for each vet office. there were a few places that do not do farm calls so I used the 'Walk Time' tab to enter a 1-minute walk radius around the location of the office. This serves 2 purposes. The first is that ArcGIS Business Analyst would include the location of the veterinary office in the new layer that was being created of all of the other buffers. The other reason was that when clicked on it would show that there was a call radius of a 1-minute walk so I would know that the information had been transferred.
This image shows the map after 3 of the shapes had been added to the map.
Early on I started thinking I would want to clip the map so the buffers stayed within Maine due to the overlap with New Hampshire. I don't have the data for the New Hampshire veterinarians who also practice in Maine, so it didn't seem right to show Maine vets working in New Hampshire when the other part of that data would not be included. Many of the vets that I spoke to who were located in southern Maine are licensed to practice veterinary medicine in New Hampshire as well, so I imagine the same holds true for Vets in New Hampshire being licensed and doing some work in southern Maine. The clipping of the map became more needed as more buffers were added as this unclipped image shows there were many places where the program did not recognize the ocean as the undrivable place that it is.
This image shows the map with all of the buffers added before it was clipped.
As you can see in the image above, the buffers covered a good portion of the ocean. Also for the same reasons I wanted the buffers to stop at the New Hampshire border I also wanted them to stop at the Canadian border.
Clipping the map turned into its own process. I shared the map from ArcGIS Business Analyst creating a web map. Then I had to open the web map in ArcGIS Pro. But when I did this the first time Pro didn't display the data the way I wanted it to. Instead of overlapping polygons, it turned into a series of polygons. The map clipped just as I thought it would but it just didn't show what I wanted to show with the data, as you can see by comparing the image below to the map on the right.
I went back and saved the map from ArcGIS Business analyst a second time on a different day and that did the trick because the data was the overlapping polygons I wanted. After I clipped it, The map was then uploaded into ArcGIS online, where I noticed the polygons did not have the name of a vet office included in the description of them. I had to go through the whole map switching between select mode and editing mode in ArcGIS Online to be sure I was adding the name of the correct vet office to the description of each polygon. Once that was done I could embed the map to the right of this text and it presented the data in the way I wanted it to be!
Some of The Ways to Interact With This Map
Interacting with this map allows you to see the data more fully. If you click on the purple heart icon you can see the name on the Vet office and their address. You can also click on any shaded part of the map and a pop-up will pop-up showing the name of the vet office and how far they will travel for a farm call. On the pop-up, there is a box that has arrows and shows the number of layers in that spot. By clicking on the arrows you can see the different offices that will drive to that location and how big their call radius is.
Data Analysis
Most of the borders within this data are very soft. I tried to use the lowest number that vets gave me because they were more likely to pick up a new client and more likely to be able to help with emergencies if they were closer to the home base of the vet. another reason these borders are soft is that some offices listed towns so to create a radius I would put all of the towns in Google maps getting directions from the address of the vet office and roughly average those times. I may be naive for thinking this way but I believe veterinarians are willing to stretch how far they drive for clients because they care about the animals. You do not spend 4 years and 200,000 plus dollars on vet school if you do not want to at the very least help animals.
There is little to no coverage along the northwestern border of the state. There are also very few people if any living out there because there is Baxter State Park, and Katahdin Woods and Waters and most of everything else is working forest. I think the bigger concern is the lack of coverage in the down east area. There are multiple vets willing to go to MDI but they are all over an hour and a half away, so when an emergency comes up they are likely not in a position to help. Vets that have larger call Radiuses are less able to help in emergencies when their appointments are on the other side of their call radius. Depending on how far the vet will drive that could mean they are anywhere from 1 to 4 hours away.
With the current conditions of the Canadian border being closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic that could affect some of the vets that normally travel across the border. Although the border is still open for medical purposes, animals are included in that distinction, the U.S. and Canada reacted differently to the pandemic including masks becoming a political debate in much of the U.S.. That could have an impact on how willing vets were to cross the border with the potential of putting themselves, their family, and their other clients at a higher risk than if they did not cross the border into the U.S..
As the population in Maine is growing older, vets are no exception to this, I would be interested in coming back to this data ten years from now to see how much this map has changed. AVMA looked at the demographics of vets and noticed that more people were going to vet school later and more practices were corporate-owned instead of a single vet being the owner, doctor, and doing all the other parts of running a business. It would also be interesting to see if the horse populations follow the vet offices into the counties that are more populated or start to center around a central veterinarian in the more rural areas. The horse population data would have to more detailed to look at those changes.
