Outsourcing

Outsourcing the animal care function is a way in which organizations can achieve these efficiencies and cost savings in many ways.

With research funding in increasingly limited supply, organizations are examining new options for creating efficiencies and cost savings in their animal facilities. The federal government led the way in outsourcing animal care in the late 1980s by replacing many of its career animal caretakers with contractors. Since then, more and more universities and commercial organizations have decided to employ animal care contractors as well. Yet despite this increase, animal care outsourcing remains a confusing concept to some organizations. I hope to clarify the many benefits of outsourcing in this short article.

Why Consider Outsourcing?
The reasons that organizations choose to outsource their animal care are as varied as the organizations themselves. In most cases, the organization has had chronic difficulty in hiring and maintaining quality staff. In other cases, they have been unable to eliminate poor performing staff members, being thwarted by an inefficient bureaucracy or human resources department. In the case of the federal government, the A-76 program mandates that many functions of government be studied to determine if they can be performed better and more cost effective by contractors. In a few unique cases, organizations have chosen to outsource their animal care for a few years in order to improve a chaotic environment created by organizational politics. Once the problems were corrected, the organizations chose to bring the animal care function back in-house.

An upcoming AAALAC site visit is another factor that has prompted organizations to employ an animal care contractor. A contractor can bring a long history of successful AAALAC preparation from their other contracts and production facilities to a contract. Mock AAALAC site visits and program reviews are often part of this preparation.

As varied as the reasons above are, all organizations have the same overall goal in mind — better performance. In the following paragraphs, I will describe the many ways that out-sourcing animal care can result in better performance for your organization.

Types of Animal Care Contracts
The focus of this article is on outsourcing the animal care function to a contractor. However, it’s important to note the many variations of this service are available and currently in use by most animal care contractors. Contract functions run the gamut from full facility management, where the contractor oversees all daily operations of the facility, purchases supplies, interacts directly with investigators, and so forth, to simple temp-to-hire contracts in which one or two animal caretakers or cage washers are supplied for a fixed period of time. Some contracts only provide supervisory staff, with the animal caretakers, technicians, and cage washers still directly employed by the organization. In terms of size, contracts can vary from one person to several hundred, spread out over many facilities and campuses.