Thank you for your nomination to serve as the President of the JVMS for the next year.  The year ahead of us is predicted to be one of continued economic challenges, a change in national political leadership, continued local and statewide challenges by independent interest groups, large pharmacies, and discount health service providers.  In this environment it is even more important to reaffirm our support for organized Veterinary Medicine.

This past year, under Dr. William’s leadership as a united veterinary society, we have worked hard to prevent local regulation that would have added additional over site of our practices.  The proposed amendment to the Pet Ordinance changing the city licensing from voluntary to mandatory was taken off the docket with negotiations for the city to allow us to increase our voluntary participant numbers and in turn reimburse us additional monies to help offset the cost of internally administering the program.  In the process of these actions we reaffirmed the JVMS support for the local Animal Care and Control and their efforts in Animal Welfare for the City of Jacksonville.

The issues that I will be working on this next year and will be looking to our members for their support are:

  1. Continuing to build the voluntary licensing program with the city
  2. Working with the city on the legality of the mobile vaccination clinics that do not appear to fully be within the city ordinances for business licensing
  3. Working with the FVMA to monitor and understand the Pharmacy Boards interest in licensing our clinics and placing them under their over site.
  4. Supporting the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine through our longstanding scholarship/loan program and veterinary community input.
  5. Continued outreach to the local membership to increase interest and participation in promoting our common interests.

I would like to thank all our members for supporting and celebrating this excellent profession that we belong to.  Through the work of our Society and other related organizations we can and will work to continually improve our livelihood, our patient’s lives, and our personal lives.

Respectfully Yours,

Rick Sutliff  DVM (drrsutliff@bellsouth.net)