ISP-2025-094 meeting recap

Good morning, Mr. Chair. I'd like to invite district 87 and today I'll have representatives of pain or help in me. Representative Stetson-Peter district three here for moral support and voicing technical difficulties here. Well, I wonder why you went whisperin to you. All right, Diane, you go ahead and present your. Mr. Chair, the first item is the ISP 225 94. This is a veterinarian issue that we had. So if you remember colleagues last legislative session, we changed some veterinarian issues. When we did that, as we normally do, sometimes in the legislature, we're trying to do the right thing, I guess, what we missed a few details. And so this is coming back around giving some details back to the animal health board, especially for our veterinarians. So first one would be we did not give the statute authority for them to go and pretty much inspect and look at other veterinarians. So right now, they have no enforcement mechanism right now. So if you're a doctor, there's enforcement mechanisms there. When we transition over, we did not transition that statute authority. So that's what this kind of does is look into that and make sure we get that corrected. Also, too, is if I remember correctly, there's a pot of money. It's about $700,000 that the veterinarians they put in this money themselves. It's not GR or anything else. It's special. It's their money. Well, that didn't transition over. So it's just sitting in an account over in the Ag Department. There's rules that say only the veterinarians can spend it. Well, we didn't move that over. So what this does is moving that over and what they want to do with that, which I think is a good thing as a legislator is they want to use that money to hire their own enforcement agents that know what they're doing and paid them out of this money. So it's not an increase of funds coming out of GR or anything else. They want to pay it themselves, which I'm glad about that. Third, you want to have me remember the telehealth part. We want to have that telehealth, which right now in the state of Arkansas, as you know, especially in the big animals side, we are hurting for veterinarians on the big animal health side. So if we can do some telemedicine there, that'll help that tremendously. The other thing about the telehealth part is we don't want people from Saudi Arabia trying to do veterinarian medicine here in Arkansas. That's happening right now. Yeah, that's happening right now. This would tighten that up. Also colleagues, you have a letter from the Arkansas Veterinary Medicine Medical Association that kind of describes their support and what this does from the experts themselves. And I think Mr. Chair, we have a couple of folks here from veterinarians in the association that your discretion would like to come up and speak. That committee any questions at this point? Say now if you bring your. Hello, I'm Rob Conner. I'm a veterinarian in mountain home Arkansas. Good morning. I'm Kate Williams, a veterinarian in Springdale, Arkansas. Good morning, guys. I'm Mike Pallone. Mike Pallone, a veterinarian from Rosebud, Arkansas. All right. We're here to kind of let you know that some of the challenges we're having in the state of Arkansas, providing care for all of our farmers and all of the people in the rural under served areas. You know, some legislation was passed a couple years ago to open up telemedicine for our Kansas, which we support. We're completely for that. They also created a couple of mid-level practitioner positions for mid-level practitioners to help us support you on the farm as well. We support that as well. So really the biggest thing is we don't have any really ability as a committee where we're now the Veterinary Medical Examining Committee. We're not a board. So we pass all of our recommendations up to the animal health board, which has one practicing Veterinary and on it and two poultry veterinarians and it's kind of their job then to guide the people in agriculture on the animal health board with through the decision making. For some it's a little dysfunctional. It's very difficult for us to it's not timely and we lack the ability to kind of in real time fix problems. So that's kind of in a nutshell why we're here. So I serve on the Veterinary Medical Examining Committee, but then I'm also the current chair of the Arkansas Board of Animal Health. So I'm on both sides of it. I'm the one practicing Veterinary and on the Board of Animal Health. And so when we meet with the VMAC, the Examining Committee, which is the Committee of Veterinarians put together to regulate our profession. We regulate complaints from owners. If they have a complaint against the Veterinary and we regulate complaints against veterinary technicians as well. Then those recommendations get then pushed to the next meeting of our Board of Animal Health, and then we rule on it there. The problem we run into, like Dr. Connor said, is the speed of this. Sometimes it's a couple of months in between the VMAC meeting and the next Board of Animal Health meeting. And when we are doing this consideration at the Board of Animal Health, the other members with, I think there's 10 or 11 other members. Again, there's no veterinarians on that other than to poultry veterinarians, very intelligent veterinarians, but they're not practicing veterinarians. They work for the poultry industry. And so when those complaints come up and we're asking the members of the Board of Animal Health to rule on a veterinarian's possible licensure, possibly their way of making a living, they are uninformed on a lot of this. They rely 100% on our recommendation from the Veterinary Medical Examining Committee. And these people are given literally maybe two to three minutes to read through a complaint during the Board of Animal Health meeting, and then rule on this person's licensure or possibly a fine or just some sort of issue with their continued education. But it's not the system in work, and I'm very proud to be on both one Board and one committee. I hope to continue serving on both, but the way that it's set up right now isn't very functional to have these members of the Board of Animal Health making these decisions on a veterinarian's licensure literally in a couple of minutes. And so they're not able to read in these cases beforehand. They don't have this information before the meeting. And so some of these, when we're meeting at the VMAC, we may consider these cases for over an hour or two going through them to decide what, you know, if there was a problem made by the Veterinary Not, and if there was what would be the appropriate penalty or recommendation from the committee. And then that's pushed to the Board. And again, this is all pushed through because we might have six or seven cases, and this is one small segment of the Board of Animal Health meeting is on veterinary conditions. And these are pushed through within just a few minutes of each case. And other members of the Board of Animal Health have reached out to me saying, I'm really not comfortable making a decision on a professional's livelihood on their licensure. In this amount of time. And so we've got to restructure it somehow. There was a Board until the Board was dissolved several years ago with the shrinking of the government. And I get all that. But that Board was taken away. And currently Arkansas is the only state in the country without its own veterinary board. And so that it was against some restructuring done to make it a committee, but our committee has zero ability to investigate or promulgate rules or levy any type of fine directly. It has to go through the Board of Animal Health. And again, as a member of both, I can tell you, it's not functional the way it is. It's getting done, but it's taking months and months to where the owners of the pet that have made this complaint sometimes it's taken six, seven, eight months before they hear back is, you know, if there was any issue. And then the veterinarians on the hook, mentally, no one that this complaint is looming against he or she for months and months and months before there's any rule down. And so there has to be a quicker, more streamlined approach to the enforcement and the other thing. And I don't know much time I've got here. I don't want to ramble. But the other thing is non veterinarians. And there's been several laws passed in Arkansas for palpation and embryo transfer. And we're completely fine with all that. Even the equine dentistry and that's part of part of our agenda today, we're completely fine with that as long as they go through the proper channels and do the proper licensing. But there are a lot of people out there practicing veterinary medicine with zero license. None. There's a there's a lady in Jonesboro that a veterinarian contacted me this week. She's advertising online and she's not a vet tech. She's not a vet. But she's advertising surgery on dogs, all these advertising for all these procedures. And the problem is that a lot of the public aren't, they don't know that she's not trained. They don't know that again, what risk they would be taken taking their animal there. And as of right now, we have zero ability to it has come to our attention that you are practicing veterinary medicine without a license. You know, this is against the Arkansas practice act. We need a cease and desist letter for that. And as of right now, there's there's zero avenue for that. So that's the main thing that we're concerned about. And I serve on the veterinary medical examining committee as well. And I also represent Arkansas to the American Veterinary Medical Association, which is the parent umbrella of 115,000 practicing veterinarians across the nation. So kind of to summarize everything, we're at a pivotal point of veterinary medicine in the state of Arkansas. We do not have the examining board with the authority to enforce and also with the spotlight on Arkansas with our first veterinary school at ASU with another veterinary school coming on board. It is imperative that we have a government body with an enforcement capability for Arkansas to take the lead in the nation on how we bring two veterinary schools on board with a veterinary community that's all working together. So that is kind of a summary of why the autonomy of our examining board with the enforcement capability in the opportunity to explore the practicing medicine without a license and the enforcement is so pivotal for us at this time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I agree with you 100% enforcement is very needed at anything that is licensed. I'm a licensed building contractor and sometimes we have to self control what's happening around us because there's not enough investigators to kind of do that. In the area where I'm adding rent hospital is going to County, we do not have very many beds. I have to go to Malvern to get a bed for large animal. Now the horse doctors, they're there, but they don't work on cows. There's a lot of people would jump at somebody advertising to come help them. Absolutely. So we just hope that this will work out and we need it very badly. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair. Members, any other questions? Mr. Chair. Can I have, can I have you explain about what's going on with Saudi Arabia? Yes, you're recognized. Well, one of the unintended consequences of the telemedicine law is, you know, we obviously it's there so that we can help if representative Kozart has a cow problem and he can't get a hold of his veterinary and immediately in person. Then maybe he can call, get talk through something. Where can I get the medicine? And we do this all the time in vet medicine. So it's really not anything newer and novel. But one of the doors we accidentally kicked open is we have two. They're actually Pakistani veterinarians, but they are licensed and accredited in the state of Arkansas because our current law says that if you've passed an equivalent of a US veterinary school and then done a residency program in the United States. And then pass the national board exam for veterinarians and then in Arkansas, we have a regulatory exam that they do not have to even sit in person for so they can pass all of those tests. Get an official thumbs up from a US vet school. Be in Pakistan and you know, literally overseas in the middle of the night, middle of the day and prescribing things through telemedicine to to Arkansas. And so and we as a veterinary medical examining committee, if they've checked those boxes, we don't have the right to deny them the ability to do that. And of course, there is no oversight in that particular case. We have no idea about their training and of course that is allowing some of the international companies to also kind of take advantage of commerce in the state of Arkansas as well. That was just one, one example of some of the unintended consequences that we feel we should have the right to, you know, to police. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just walked in, but I may not cut it, but you know, up in my area, we have a lot of people moving in, but we're having, you know, getting even large animal practices. It's getting something done and, you know, we're more populated area in the other parts of the state. We're also having some nonprofits, you know, having trouble getting people to do spade and neuter. Is there anything in these that week? Is it even open our option to try to get vet techs or people that's worked at a veterinary and get them trained to do spade and neutered or typically general practice stuff that maybe they don't have to go and travel to a school, but they can get lessons to do those. Is that even a avenue because I'm looking five, 10 years down the road as somebody we have cattle, you know, we may be in the position up there where we're at, well, we're not going to be able to get people to do large animal stuff much. Well, the hope is that these veterinary schools are going to solve that problem. You know, we're four years out on the, the Jones were a school, five years out on the Cabot school. So, you know, the hope is that, you know, between both classes, there are going to be graduates, what 650 practice and veterinarians in Arkansas now. They're going to be graduating with 400 a year here in a few years. So, you know, the hope is, again, we're, I think we're going to be super saturated with the vets in four to five years. There's going to be a lot of these graduates coming out that we hope they stay in Arkansas. You know, there's no law that they have to. Obviously they can go wherever they want to, but most of these will be Arkansas kids. And so, that, that pendulum should swing in a period of time once these schools start graduating kids. The problem we run into for years is, again, these veterinary schools have been out of state. And so, you know, most of the class are in state.