Meet Dr. Tammy: Taking the Hospital on the Road

For almost 20 years, she's traveled to communities with little or no access to veterinary care. When Hamilton/Burlington SPCA set out to build this program, she's who we called.

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She's a graduate of Mississippi State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and she's credited with launching Ontario's first accredited mobile surgical unit, experience that's shaped exactly how she approaches this role at HBSPCA. Bringing wellness care and surgery into communities that don't have it isn't new territory for her; it's the work she's spent her career building toward, and it's why she was the right fit to lead our Remote Community Vet Services from the ground up.

Thanks to our new mobile license, Hamilton/Burlington SPCA can now bring wellness care and surgical services, including spay/neuter, directly into communities across Ontario, instead of requiring every animal to make the trip to our Companion Animal Hospital on Dartnall Road.

"My goal with all outreach is to improve access to care for those that don't have it," Dr. Tammy says. "We've traveled into areas that haven't had veterinarians in years - many, many years."

Nipigon was one of those areas. In June, Dr. Tammy, HBSPCA staff and a team of volunteer vets, spent time in the community and saw approximately 170 animals, some of whom hadn't been examined by a vet in years, if ever. It's one stop in a growing pattern for the program: clinics that started as one-off visits are becoming a returning presence in communities that had gone without.

Trips like this exist because the alternative is often nothing at all.

For many northern and remote communities, the nearest veterinary clinic can be four to ten hours away, if there's a road to get there. Distance, weather, and the cost of fuel and transportation put basic care out of reach for a lot of families, long before you factor in anything more serious than a routine checkup.

She spoke about the trip in a recent news interview:

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The impact goes beyond any single visit. "We know for sure that if we improve the health of a community's pets, even if we're only there a few times a year, the pets become healthier, and preventable disease becomes rarer," she says. "The community becomes healthier."

That's the case for remote veterinary work in a sentence: fewer emergencies down the road, healthier animals in the meantime, and a program that keeps showing up in the places that need it. It also means catching problems early, the kind of injury or infection that's routine when it's caught in time, and much harder to treat if a community goes years between visits.

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Programs like this don't run on good intentions alone. Every trip north, the flights, the fuel, the vaccines and supplies, Dr. Tammy's time away from her other roles need to be funded by people who believe animals in every community deserve care, not just the ones close to a hospital.

If Dr. Tammy's work in Nipigon tells you anything, it's that this program is already changing lives, 170 animals in one trip alone, in a place that had gone without a veterinarian for years. Help us keep going.