Every veterinary ER in central Indiana now uses 'diversion' — turning away sick and injured pets because no staff are available to treat them

A 2024 WTHR 13News investigation found that every 24-hour veterinary emergency hospital in central Indiana is now regularly going on 'diversion' — the ER term for closing the doors and redirecting incoming patients elsewhere. Pet owners arrive with a dog hit by a car or a cat in respiratory distress and are told to drive to another hospital, sometimes an hour or more away, which may also be on diversion. The investigation documented cases where pet owners called multiple ERs in sequence, each one closed, before finding one that could see their animal — if they found one at all. Diversion in veterinary ERs is functionally different from diversion in human ERs. In human medicine, EMTALA requires hospitals to stabilize any patient regardless of capacity. In veterinary medicine, there is no equivalent law. A veterinary ER can — and routinely does — lock its doors and refuse to see any new patients until capacity opens up. There is no ambulance dispatch system to route patients to the nearest available facility, no regional coordination of capacity, and no real-time status board showing which ERs are open. A pet owner in crisis is left to call ER after ER, explaining the emergency each time, while their animal deteriorates. This is not an Indianapolis-specific problem: the same diversion pattern has been documented in cities across the country as the veterinary staffing crisis has deepened. The root cause is an unsustainable staffing model. Veterinary emergency medicine requires board-certified or experienced emergency veterinarians willing to work overnight shifts, weekends, and holidays. These specialists are in critically short supply — there are only about 700 board-certified veterinary emergency and critical care specialists in the entire U.S. When one emergency vet leaves a market, there may be no replacement available for months. Unlike human medicine, there is no residency match system that distributes emergency physicians to underserved markets, no GME funding to train more specialists, and no regulatory requirement that a metro area maintain any emergency veterinary capacity at all. The market has simply failed, and no institution has stepped in to correct it.