Vet In Harness's blog

Don't Got No Money!

I couldn't help laughing when a friend, another vet, sent me this video. Everyone in veterinary practice has had this conversation... though often the 'client' is rather more aggressive and intimidating than this.

 

 

On career paths, moving on, kittens and textbooks.

I doubt anyone will really have noticed, but it's been a month and a half since I had anything to say for myself here.  On the off-chance that anyone reading here cares what I've been up to (or, indeed, that anyone is reading here at all!)  it's all change in Beth's world.  Very shortly I will be starting a new job, and moving away from mixed practice into small animal work.  Mainly dogs, cats, and rabbits, in other words, plus a few other pet-type-things, exotic animals and so on.  If it seems strange that I may be closing the door on over half my training this early in my career, my reasons are quite straightforward really. 

The mixed practice work I have been doing until now has been heavily small-animal biased, mostly as a consequence of being the most junior person in the practice and getting last-pick of the work.  The up-shot of this is more or less that despite doing mostly dog and cat work during the day, I still found myself on call being sent to colics, and dealing with lambings and so forth out of hours.  This really isn't a very good way to go about things, though a successful lambing is one of the great joys of veterinary work, and something I think I'll probably miss. 

The other aspect of wanting to make the move into small animal work is the question of the sheer volume of knowledge, not just that we have to have to graduate, but of constantly shifting new information, new techniques and new drugs with which we have to be familiar.  Mixed practice veterinary work is always going to be a compromise between depth and bredth of knowledge and competence.  For my own peace of mind I prefer to strive to be the best possible small animal veterinary surgeon I can be, rather than struggle to stay afloat spreading what meagre professional development time I have across every possible veterinary species.

Finally, a thought about mixed practice itself.  I suspect that in most parts of the UK mixed practice is not the future of the veterinary profession.  Already a great many mixed practices are either scaling down or giving their farm work up altogether.  The economics of farming in this country, and by extension of farm animal veterinary work, are not what you'd call favourable and in many cases, particularly where you have a reasonable density of livestock farms in the area, the most effective solution is specialist farm-animal only veterinary practices focusing heavily on health planning and preventative health care, significantly a consultancy role, and driving large distances to their clients rather than locally-based mixed practices providing essentially a fire-fighting service.   Meanwhile, the pressures of being a mixed practice in terms of staffing and the necessity of providing veterinary call-outs to farms at short notice throughout the working day (and night!) can detract from providing the best possible small animal provision, not to mention that in many cases the small animal work is expected to cross-subsidise frequently loss-making farm work.

Newborn-kittens

Anyway, enough of all that.  If you've read this far I'd like to reward you with a picture of some new-born kittens we delivered recently by caesarian section.  Very cute they were, too, and at suture removal mother and all three kittens were doing well.

Handbook of Veterinary Procedures and Emergency Treatment

Richard B. Ford

Finally, a book recommendation, on the very very very slim chance that anyone reading this is a clinical veterinary student - I have just discovered the book I *really wish* I'd had for my final year.  I cannot recommend "Kirk and Bistner's Handbook of Veterinary Procedures and Emergency Treatment" by Ford and Mazzaferro highly enough.  It has really immensely useful 'how to' guides to procedures from the simple to the really quite complicated, plus all sorts of useful reference guides including a really comprehensive guide to poisons and toxins, and the killer feature for a final-year text, differential lists for just about everything.  Paired up with the Merck Manual and a formulary, you've probably got just about everything you actually need as a small animal medicine reference, as long as you've got access to a veterinary library and a well-stocked copy-card!