In the first part of this series, I suggested the younger version of myself would have benefited from having more knowledge of signalment.
The second thing I think the young Gerardo Poli could learn is the importance of practical work and how it can build bridges with potential employers.
Practical work is where connections are built
Coming from my experience as a practice owner, I suggest students do as much practical work as they can in the clinics and hospitals they might want to work in.
This could be part of the formal practical programme, in the form of paid work (such as working in veterinary nursing) and voluntary work.
When you are on practical placement, you build relationships with the team and get exposed to the dynamics. It will give you an insight to help you decide if this is the practice you want to work at after graduation, and also gives that practice an opportunity to get to know you.
If the practice likes what it sees, it is more likely to hire you over someone based on the resume of someone it has never met in person.
A date I will never forget is 6 June. Four years previously on that day I completed the final exam of my master’s degree, marking 11 long and tough years of study.
I vowed at that point to never study again, although my love of learning didn’t allow that to last long.
Then it was crunch and career decision time – which, for a new graduate, is exciting, but also causes anxiety.
I have learned a great deal in my time since, so for all those students who recently completed their studies, firstly, congratulations and, secondly, over the next two weeks I have some tips that will help with the transition into being a new grad.
Finding your first clinic
Does the clinic you are considering working for offer an appropriate mentoring and structured learning?
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to find the best fit and perfect place, or overthink the process – you are just starting out and it’s likely your focus, passion and direction will change as your career progresses.
Merits in waiting exist for a practice that fits with your wants and needs, but don’t wait forever as you need to start putting your theory into practice.
I think the most important aspect to look at is the team. A practice with an amazing supportive team would be a wiser option compared to a practice with all the bells and whistles.
The next thing would be do they offer an appropriate level of mentoring and structured learning?
Ask if they have trained vets and new grads before, and do they have training and learning resources available to guide your learning?
Perspective
Days will occur where you make mistakes and feel as though you haven’t done a good job. It’s important to be able to put things into perspective – remember, everyone makes mistakes.
I still have days where I feel like I’ve failed. It’s vital you can be clear that you may fail at a task or moment, but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
If you have a bad morning, don’t generalise it into a bad day or bad week. It shows much more passion, talent and character to learn and grow from a mistake.
Being a vet – especially in emergency – you have to learn to be able to stop, let go and reset a number of times each day so you are fully present for what comes next.
Understanding perspective on bad days, and asking what can you learn from this, is a skill that takes time to master, but is one that will help you a great deal in your veterinary journey.
It had been an ambition of mine since the beginning of vet school to do some type of work abroad, whether it be preclinical or clinical, a paid position or volunteer work.
A big reason I undertook an intercalated MSc was for the option it presented for a three-month research period in Western Australia. Sadly, COVID-19 put a stop to that and my research never wandered further than my desk – but, if anything, the pandemic made me feel even more passionate about travelling for my EMS.
Gone to Goa
Weekends spent “lolling on the beach” were well-deserved, says Eleanor.
A friend and I both settled on a small rescue centre in Goa, India, for the placement (neither of us feeling quite brave enough to go it alone) and despite planning it almost a year in advance, the date caught up with us quite quickly. Before we knew it, we were there.
Let the record show that the motivation for this trip was not to escape from the harsh English January weather, nor to fill up on delicious curries, although the temperature did make a welcome change and I’m unsure a takeaway will ever cut it again.
The whole reason for the placement was to gain the kind of surgical experience that just isn’t readily available to students in the UK.
Understandably, vet practices can take a while to warm up to students enough to trust them to carve into somebody’s beloved animals, but this makes for generation after generation of new grads who feel completely out of depth with a scalpel in their hands.
Great(er than our) expectations
The placement’s main advertising pull had been as an opportunity to gain incredible surgical experience, but we had gone into it with some trepidation that it wasn’t going to be nearly as busy and hands-on as we’d hoped. It turned out to surpass our expectations and go right out the other side…
Weekends spent lolling on the beach were well-deserved after numerous 11-hour shifts with numb fingers and thumbs from uncooperative clamps and needle holders.
The surgical side of the trip deserves an article of its own – but suffice it to say that, between the two of us, my friend and I neutered almost 50 dogs and cats, including 15 unassisted but supervised dog spays. It was an incredible rewarding feeling when each surgery finished, knowing we were doing even just a small bit in the effort to reduce India’s stray population.
Eleanor found her EMS placement in Goa “incredible rewarding”.
Learning valuable lessons
Let it be said, I am not the most confident of travellers, and 18 hours of travel across three planes and four airports are not for the faint of heart, but neither is India – and while I have entirely fallen in love with the country, its beauty and its animals, there was a lot of disorganisation that made my poor little control-freak brain spin.
I think that learning to take each day as it comes, and constantly adapting to new situations or pressures has taught me a lot of valuable skills in a very short space of time.
In particular, the vet who taught and supervised us was invaluable in making the placement such a success. She gave us an incredible amount of patience and taught me skills in both surgery and how to face a stressful situation that I will carry with me throughout my career.
From the moment you decide to become a vet, the road before you – from the start to the end of your course – is paved with decisions.
From where to go, to what to look for in a job (although vet students do get to put off the dreaded entrance into the “real world” for a couple more years than the average student), the next choice to be made is always around the corner.
Where to study
When it comes to picking the right veterinary degree, my opinion (which is by no means gospel) is that it’s:
10% course content
90% location, location, location
For students having a tough time choosing where to attend vet school (although, understandably, most are happy to go anywhere they receive an offer), it can be important to look above and beyond the curriculum. After all, the veterinary course in the UK is heavily standardised and, as much as every school wants you to believe that theirs has something special that nobody else’s does (and maybe they do), at the end of the day, you will leave each university with the same qualifications.
I’m not studying where I am today because I fell in love with Bristol vet school, I fell in love with Bristol itself.
I still remember getting off the coach with my dad for an open day and having the biggest smile on my face from the moment I stepped on to the cobbled streets. To this day, I’ve no idea why – perhaps it’s the multi-coloured Balamory-esque buildings, or the accents and calls of “my lover” that made me feel like I’d stumbled into a remake of Hot Fuzz, or maybe it’s the fact there are sheep and cows roaming just a stone’s throw away from the clinical campus.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t the labs, the course brochures or the lecture theatres…
For some, staying closer to home is what’s important; maybe for childcare, financial or emotional support. For others, moving away from what is familiar and stepping out of your comfort zone can play a vital part in learning independence and gaining a wider perspective.
What to study
Selective/elective weeks, while only making up a small component of your final year, are a rare opportunity to tailor your education in what is otherwise a very nationally homogenised learning infrastructure.
Work experience is another excellent outlet through which vet students can customise their teaching opportunities and prioritise what is most important to them. Practices where we feel most immediately at home are the ones that reflect our values around the profession, and the teams and individuals we bounce off easily are often indicative of the type of professional that you would/aspire to be.
Where to work
With the average retention of a veterinary professional standing depressingly at just seven short years, there’s been a massive drive from the ground up to improve the quality of the profession, and to make the career more mentally and emotionally sustainable.
We’re taught about developing resilience and mindfulness from the first year of vet school, and in the past half-decade, four-day weeks have become the standard for a lot of vets up and down the country.
With vets in such high demand, new graduates currently have a plethora of jobs to choose from. Considerations over commute times, staff retention, caseloads, OOH work, and weekend rotas (let alone salaries) are now luxuries that are becoming more and more affordable.
I would personally love to see a day when vet students can take modules in their final year – and with mixed practices decreasing in number, there may eventually be separate institutions for small animal and large animal vets.
As somebody soon to be entering the job market, I can tell you that decision paralysis is most certainly real, but I still believe that the more choices we are able to make, and the more control we have over our careers, will make us better and happier professionals.
The cost of living has risen sharply in the past year. Food, bills, and fuel costs seem suddenly extortionate and yet student loans haven’t budged an inch – meaning students are paying more for food, bills and other essentials than ever before, with relatively less financial aid.
Vet students in particular are no strangers to stretching the pound – we’re in it for the long haul after all, so five to six years of rent, utilities and food, with little to no income is something most of us have to accept as par for the course.
The tricky thing is that while food bills can be lowered by steering free of Deliveroo and “Taste the Difference”, and opting for the simpler things in life, and a couple of extra jumpers helps lower heating costs in the winter, there’s really no way of getting around the current fuel crisis.
You’ll go far
The reality of EMS in the current climate is that many students are still trying to replace pre-clinical and clinical placements that were cancelled during the pandemic, and a lot of veterinary conglomerates have contractual obligations to a specific university.
With the number of vet schools on the rise, “freelance” placements are going to become thinner on the ground, and if (like me) you live close to one of these vet schools, you may need to travel farther afield for your EMS placements.
This means not only has the cost of living increased for students in general, but the cost of education for veterinary students is also on the up.
Automotive breakdown
For the average engine, the cost of a mile’s journey in June was 16p (according to the RAC Fuel and Mileage calculator), whereas placements can range from within walking distance to over an hour’s drive away. If a student has a daily commute of just 13 miles (roughly a 15 to 20 minute drive) each way, for two weeks – even if they let their car run right down to the red – they’d still be spending more than £40 on fuel.
For longer commutes, or ones where vets expect students to follow in their own cars on callouts, it’s easy to see how the costs can get out of control.
Covering costs
Veterinary students are required to fulfil a minimum 26 weeks of work experience during their clinical years. For those unable to find placements near their university or home accommodation, or unable to find affordable accommodation near the placement itself, commuting is a necessity to gain the experience and accreditation needed for their degree.
For a long time the veterinary industry has been striving to improve its inclusivity and accessibility, but with fuel prices hitting an all-time high this year, travel bursaries may be a real necessity in ensuring the degree is not made unaffordable.
If you don’t come from a “horsey background” (like me) then the equine side of the vet course can feel a little overwhelming.
From a different number of ribs and guttural pouches to the inability to vomit, horses have an abundance of clinical differences to our smaller patients, and so (quite rightly) often need to be studied in their own right, much the same as with farm animal medicine.
Clinical aspects aside, the world of equine also comes with a wealth of nomenclature that seemed to me, at first, like a second language. A disease called “glanders and farcy” was a particular favourite equine term of mine, as it sounds deceptively quaint despite in fact being an incredibly serious and often fatal notifiable disease.
For these reasons, in all honesty, I was a little apprehensive of my first equine clinical placement – most likely not helped by a distinct lack of large animal clinical EMS up until that point (thank you COVID-19).
As it turns out however, the two-week placement became one of my favourite so far. So, for those of you with it still to come, here are a few things I wish I’d known going in…
Time to smell the hay
Small animal medicine can sometimes be fast paced, and patients can come and go in a blur. With 15-minute consults and a lot to pack in within that time, there sometimes just aren’t the opportunities for students to ask questions or for advice.
On the other hand, equine and large animal medicine placements are often a little less patient intensive, affording students the opportunity to really dive into each individual case, rather than losing track of how many they’ve already seen that morning.
The drive between clients can also provide time for asking questions, filing in your case logs for the last animal, and reading up on the next.
Communication, communication, communication
Depending on the client, of course, a lot of call outs will involve a certain amount of time standing around the horse with the client waiting patiently at the reigns.
Dentals, in particular, can take a surprisingly long time and while in small animal practice the vet can typically just stick the radio on, plonk on a stool and get to it, that might seem rather rude with the animals owner standing right next to you. Being able to hold a conversation with the client, whether its about their animal or just the nice weather we’ve been having, is a skill that can sometimes be sidelined in favour of clinical competencies.
Making conversation can also be extra difficult if you’re trying to be clinically competent at the same time – and this is where multitasking comes in, as vets will often have to engage with the client for more than an hour while performing tasks on the animal that a smallies vet would probably take a dog out the back to do.
As a student, spending long periods of time with a vet and a single client is a great opportunity to practice client engagement and communication. If in doubt, and you’re left alone with the owner while the vet runs back to their car, try asking about their animal (how long they’ve had it, if it’s their first, and so on). We all love gushing over our pets, and it goes a long way to show enthusiasm instead of the vet coming back only to find the two of you staring in silence at the grass.
When you’re not feeling 100% on your catheter placement or blood sampling, it helps to have something big to aim for. This is where horses come in…
It’s almost like they’ve gone out of their way to be the perfect injection-giving training wheels, with jugulars like drain pipes and large obvious muscle bellies for you to grab in one hand and pop a needle in with the other. Once you’ve mastered the horse IV and IM, it’s only a matter of sizing down.
My main takeaway from this placement was a reminder not to shy away from practising things that don’t come naturally, or aren’t your favourite thing in the world. There’s no point practising the things you know you’re best at, for the sake of feeling good about succeeding in something you already knew how to do.
You’ll feel much better after that initial leap out of your comfort zone, when you succeed in something you couldn’t do before.
Before coming to university, I never really gave much thought to the life or journey of my food before it ended up on my plate; I wasn’t well informed on the topics of air miles, methane production or abattoir welfare standards.
If you had asked me if I wanted to make sure the foods I ate were ethically sourced, had a low carbon footprint, or had once lived a healthy and happy life, I would have said “of course” – all of these things mattered to me on a subliminal level, but I don’t think I really grasped how any of these concepts were within my control.
Welfare
Animal welfare makes up such a large part of the veterinary course from the very first year, so it’s no wonder so many students are vegetarian or vegan by the time they graduate. I must admit that my Easter Sunday lunch was a little hard to swallow after my first-year lambing placement… and one week on a pig farm certainly had me seeing my Christmas pigs in blankets in a whole new light.
The vet course provides a window into the side of meat production the public will never access – and may not even want to.
In an ideal world (where every animal has a full and healthy life devoid of stress, discomfort or suffering before it is killed), I would have no qualms about eating meat, but the sad truth is that’s just economically and logistically unviable – at least for now.
But welfare isn’t as cut and dried as people might think. Take cows, for example: if you picture a happy cow, it’s probably roaming around in a field, right? Well, frustratingly, fields have many disadvantages – offering parasites, botulism and rogue pieces of metal, while providing no protection from the elements, nor a means for the farmer to moderate their food intake to ward off laminitis, hypocalcaemia and a bunch of other welfare issues.
Along with owning a pair of flared jeans, or developing calves of steel thanks to the endless hills, you didn’t go to the University of Bristol unless you’ve developed a complex over your carbon footprint.
One of the simplest ways to be more environmentally friendly is to eat less meat, but many studies are showing that a global move to veganism/vegetarianism is not the answer for our ever-growing population. A lot of land just isn’t suitable for crops, and rice farming already makes up more than 10% of global methane production.
Again, if we were looking for an ideal scenario, it would be to eat less meat, sourced locally and sustainably, and to value it enough to pay a price that would allow farmers to invest in greener technologies.
Student budgets
Working on farms at all levels of the course gives vet students an appreciation for how much farmers care about their animals, and how hard they work to balance that priority with sustaining a business. Even if you’re sceptical about the meat industry, there is always the option to do research into the farms and butchers that are close to you.
Frustratingly, making good choices from both a welfare and environmental perspective can be much pricier than the alternatives, and this has been one of my own drivers for decreasing my meat consumption during my uni career. Despite this, I still try very hard to make informed choices, and when I do buy meat I aim to prioritise quality over quantity wherever possible.
In very small, but meaningful ways, change is shaped by the decisions and purchases we all make, and understanding the steps that brought the ingredients from the farm to your plate fosters a respect and appreciation for what you are eating, beyond just its taste.
Last week, we discussed core goals for social media within a veterinary practice. This time, I want to look at target audience – how to define them, how to reach them and how to keep them engaged.
Getting the audience right is essential. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money – and who wants that?
You need to put yourself in their mindset – sometimes, we want to share something from the practice; however, is it really of interest to the pet-loving public?
“Keep it simple” is the best advice I was given. Social media posts tend to have a short shelf life – blink and you miss them, so make your point quickly and make sure the intended audience knows to pay attention.
What? When? How?
You always have to think about what your audience wants to know, how it wants to know it and when it will be online to see it. By profiling your main audiences, you can then create images, video, wording and tone that is going to engage them.
As with most things, having a strategy in place for each audience group is important. When you start, you want to experiment with timings of posts, style, and content and creative, but after a while, you will see a clear outline of who, what and when works for you.
Hashtags are a type of metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services that make it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content.
It is important to use the insights on your chosen platform – from that, you can learn which posts are the most liked, most shared, the demographics of your audience and the times that seem to get the most engagement.
Reaching the right people
Make sure you have researched hashtags, locations, interest groups, ages and keywords. Also, when you add an image, video or blog, make sure your tagging and keywords are accurate and up to date.
Many social platforms and networks reward a page for relevance and authentic content. This is even more important for paid content – it may be tempting to get likes and follows from the cheapest targeting; however, it is better to build an audience of those who may need your service and are relevant.
Also, regularly profiling your audience may show a potential audience group you are missing – such as, perhaps, a younger demographic, a location that doesn’t engage or an industry angle.
Striking the right balance
My book The MiniVet Guide is aimed at helping students through their studies and in clinical practice – so a key audience for me is veterinary students. I love sharing tips, tutorials and surgical videos to help them in their journey as they become a vet – and their response has been incredible.
I quickly discovered what engaged them and what didn’t – even if I sometimes want to post something different, you have to find the right balance between what you enjoy sharing and what the audience wants to see.
Next week, I will look at what platforms to use and how to get the most out of them.
Despite that all COVID-19 restrictions are due to be removed as early as the end of the month, the long-term impacts of this pandemic have yet to ease and will likely be sending ripples through many professions for the foreseeable future.
The virus has already left lasting changes to the landscape of the veterinary industry – not only in how it operates, but in how new professionals are taught from the ground up. Long gone are the days of packed-out waiting rooms and lecture theatres.
The more things change
Even with restrictions out of the way, it’s thought that measures put in place over the past two years to reduce viral transmission in our practices may remain the “new normal”, with clients asked to wait outside until necessary, and often with only a single owner asked to come in with their pet at any one time.
Several vet schools now operate under the banner of “blended learning”, whereby the curriculum is taught in a mixture of face-to-face content, live and online lectures, alongside pre-recorded, virtually accessible resources.
In the face of recurrent industrial action – coupled with the rising, desperate demand for new veterinary professionals – online teaching may offer a convenient, long-term solution.
Fallen behind
As with all change, there are pros and cons, although one area I think is yet to be fully addressed is the issue of EMS backlogs.
There are current backlogs in the NHS, the postal system and in many other major industries throughout the country, and I don’t believe the veterinary student training system has escaped unaffected.
For a good 12 to 18 months, many practices – especially small independents – were forced to shut their doors to both pre-clinical and clinical placements – and although EMS requirements were lowered for all year groups due to graduate by 2023, every succeeding year must complete the formerly required 26 weeks.
This has led to an overwhelmingly large number of students competing for a progressively smaller number of placement opportunities.
This makes it particularly difficult for students who lack their own transport, or the funds to travel far from their university or hometown, meaning there may be growing social inequity in the variety and quality of experience vet students are able to obtain.
Better the devil you know
Not only this, but large veterinary conglomerates may have the infrastructure to accommodate larger numbers of students, and new graduates may want to “stick with what they know” and, therefore, be less likely to consider signing contracts with smaller, independent practices.
There is also the argument that, with the rise of online teaching and decrease in student-lecturer contact, work experience has never been such a valuable tool in supplementing a student’s learning.
With the demand for placements higher than ever before, and veterinary practices sometimes two or three times busier than before the pandemic, the financial cost of EMS for some students has never been greater.
Essential experiences
Confidence, satisfaction and a balanced education behind all new graduates serves the interest of both individual professionals, and the profession as a whole.
In my opinion, there has never been a greater need for a review of the need for higher education funding for veterinary students, to allow every student access to a large variety of work experience and the opportunity to see what different avenues are available to them after graduation.
Vets have to handle a variety of difficult situations, from delivering bad news to addressing financial difficulties. But when it comes to tackling client grief, awkwardness or anger, it’s a bit like that old children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – we can’t go over, under or around it – we’ve got to go through it!
I recently had a three-hour communications practical, during which my fellow students and I were tossed into a randomly selected clinical scenario designed to help us deal with uncomfortable areas of future practice. These included such topics as:
discussing the needs for euthanasia
apologising for clinical mistakes
reasoning with angry farmers when their herds came back TB-positive
Role play
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, is available from Amazon.co.uk and other booksellers.
All scenarios were conducted with real actors portraying the clients – and although we’d been given a list of topics to revise if we wanted – any revision turned out to be next to useless as the exercise was less about what you knew, and more about how you dealt with people.
Personally, I find this type of practical as rewarding – if not more so – than our clinical skills work. We have countless opportunities to practise suturing, spaying and catheterising in the labs at school, and in final-year rotations, but dealing with the raw side of client communications is the one thing we never actually get to experience until we’re suddenly in the driver’s seat.
It’s completely understandable – nobody wants a student present at their most vulnerable moments. If my own pet was being put down, I’d want the comfort of an experienced vet doing the job and walking me through it from start to finish.
Learning experiences
That’s why I think communication practicals are so incredibly useful, and it’s a real shame that I’ve only had three in my course so far. It can be difficult to learn from and build upon experiences spaced years apart from one another, and I feel incredibly sorry for the year before me (while I was intercalating) who had to do their scenarios over Zoom.
One of the most valuable lessons that these practicals have taught me, is not to be afraid of emotion.
It can be difficult – especially when a very valid defence mechanism for many medical professionals is to distance yourself from it at all costs – but there are moments when all is required of you is simply to be there, to listen and understand.
Just be there
There’s no textbook in the world that can teach you that. When a client (or an actor pretending to be a client) is crying in front of you, you want to fix their grief because fixing things is, quite literally, your profession.
Your instinct is to talk and fill the silence, but instead, you need to wait for them to process the moment and then be there to answer their questions.
Some things you can’t fix and you can’t work around – you just have to go through them.
