Is play important?
Sarah The Vet
by jimkeir
4M ago
Reading Time: 14 minutes Here is an post written by my husband, Jim Keir, in response to trying to persuade to me to play some computer games. It goes into great depth…. “Me? Play games? Hah! I’m too old for that” That’s a real shame, if that’s your first thought. Play, imagination and games are very important to both physical and mental development and it would be a bit worrying if you thought you had nothing more to learn after your mid-teens. The young of intelligent animals all play. Puppies, kittens, apes, dolphins, they all play. So do humans, of course, but at some point humans start be ..read more
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Lessons for thriving as a vet – for final year students and students of life
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
10M ago
Reading Time: 3 minutes No-one will invest in you more than you invest in yourself. Spend time, money and energy to improve your knowledge, skills and well-being which will improve your current and future life and be independent of others’ expectations or needs. Your role as a vet is in the support and service of people, animals just happen to be the medium through which we do it. Be human throughout all your doing. This is a team sport, don’t do this alone. It’s fine to not know where you want your career to go and also don’t fixate on one path before trying out some of others. It takes time ..read more
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Why Are Locums So Expensive? The True Costs of Locums vs Employees
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
11M ago
Reading Time: 10 minutes Bring up the subject of locums and sometime in the next few sentences you’re more or less guaranteed to hear the phrase “HOW much?”, either from the indignation of those that hire locums or employees jealous of the locum’s day rate. The standard reaction for many people seems to be to take a locum’s day rate, multiply by 5 (days) then 52 (weeks) and come up with something astronomical as an annual salary. A few years of that, you might be thinking, and I can buy a small island, retire and only need to encounter animals in the form of furry companions. Sadly, the number ..read more
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Difficult People – they are everywhere!
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
1y ago
Reading Time: 8 minutes I’m sure you’ve come across plenty of difficult clients – it’s a given if you’ve worked in clinical practice in the past few years. Or perhaps as a practice owner or manager, you have some difficult employees. Maybe you have been called difficult or worked with colleagues who are difficult. There are plenty (as in millions) of articles and courses on how to deal with difficult people. It’s a really common problem! Truth bomb. If you label someone as ‘difficult’ it is more a reflection on yourself than the person you are dealing with; it is a label we use and respond to ..read more
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Burnout in the Veterinary Profession – A Personal Perspective
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
1y ago
Reading Time: 9 minutes This article looks at burnout from a personal perspective and follows on from Mark Turner’s article in the July 2020 edition of Companion. Unlike other articles I have read on this topic which tend to be fairly high-level overviews, this is different in that it describes, and is based on, personal experience. Burnout is a frequently misused and misunderstood term, often used as a buzzword to get the attention of the reader. This short-changes those who have been unfortunate enough to experience burnout themselves; it can have life changing consequences to those it affec ..read more
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Trust Part 2 – How to create and build trust
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
1y ago
Reading Time: 9 minutes Trust. We have great difficulty in describing what trust is because it is just too big, complex and vague to understand – breaking it down into smaller parts makes it much more comprehensible. We often lack the skills or language to talk about trust and so we shy away from the attempt.  However, we have a great opportunity to learn how to build and talk about trust and, as I showed in part 1 of this series of articles, building trust is crucial for people and businesses. The essence of trust is creating safety in relationships in order to have strong connection wit ..read more
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My Year Reconnecting With Nature
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
1y ago
Reading Time: 3 minutes This year I’m studying plants, in detail. To be precise, ‘Practical Ethnobotany and Plant Identification’. I’m sure some of you are thinking ‘what is ethnobotany’ and ‘why study it’? Ethnobotany is the study of the connection between plants and humans, in particular how people of a certain culture and region make use of the indigenous plants. Current associations with the term are of indigenous or foreign cultures, but this dismisses the importance of plants in our current culture to us here, now, wherever that is. Since our earliest times humans have depended on plants ..read more
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Trust in the Workplace – Part 1
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
2y ago
Reading Time: 9 minutes I’m sure I’m not alone in having difficulty in describing what trust is – it is just too big, complex and vague. Trust is essential in healthy relationships, vital for connection in the social human species, in both workplaces and personal relationships. Yet, despite its essential nature in all types of relationships, trust is one of the key factors I’ve found lacking in a number of veterinary practices with negative ramifications such as defensive practices clinically and non-clinically (read more here), disengagement from the job, low cooperation in teams, suspicion a ..read more
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Is the profession broken? Possible solutions
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
2y ago
Reading Time: 10 minutes At the recent London Vet Show, it was clear there is an overwhelming negativity in the profession regarding recruitment and retainment in particular, and that somehow because of this the profession is broken. How did we get here? What can we do? The current workforce crisis has to be a wakeup call to the profession that we cannot keep doing what we have been doing in the preceding decades. We can’t look backwards; that is not the way we are going. There will be no quick fixes or easy answers for the problems in the profession. What it will take is solution-based think ..read more
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Are Salaries a Problem in the Vet profession?
Sarah The Vet
by Sarah
2y ago
Reading Time: 9 minutes Money is a subject we shy away from talking about, whether it is with clients or our own financial situation. This is compounded by the attitude, in the UK at least, that it is not the done thing to talk about money, it has a taboo surrounding it. In the current supply and demand staffing issues we might expect salaries to increase but practices continue to say this is impossible. Vet salaries have been stagnant for over a decade while inflation continues to cheapened our money and student debt has massively increased. Could we be missing out on a key reason for the cur ..read more
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