The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing

In this episode, we speak to Specialist Veterinary Clinical Pathologist Dr Brett Stone. Brett has extensive experience in both clinical pathology and histopathology. He has worked as a pathologist in Australia and the UK for over 15 years and has a special interest in cytology and immunocytochemistry.  In our previous path episode with Dr Rebekkah Liffman, we talked about how to GET the perfe...

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” Mark Twain In episode 49 we dissected one of the biggest fears that many vets have: the fear of an official board complaint, from the perspective of a practitioner facing a complaint against them. In this episode, we look at the same issue from the side of the official body that deals with complaints. I’m a firm...

There are many things you do almost every day in your job as a clinical veterinarian, usually multiple times a day. Sometimes these things become so routine that you don’t even stop to think about what you do and how you do it, and whether there could potentially be better ways that will deliver better results. And you DEFINITELY never get around to asking the questions you’ve always wondered abou...

Courage. Grit. Persistence. Some might call it stubbornness. Whatever you call it - our guest for this episode has it in spades. Dr Mariana Pardo is an emergency and critical care specialist at the Veterinary Emergency Group, in Whiteplains, New York. She qualified as a vet in Santiago, Chile, in 2009, and then moved to the United States where she walked a long long road to the first female emerge...

Yes. it's totally fine. In fact, it's the preferred way to send your spleens to the lab. Here's another thing that I learnt from this episode: pathologists don't necessarily look like Uncle Fester from the Adams Family! Join us with the very un-Uncle Fester-like anatomical pathologist Dr Flaminya Coiacetto for more things that you didn't know about how to ensure better histopath results. (And happ...

For this episode, rather than casting our conversational net wide and seeing which topics come up, we have a very specific topic. We wanted to get insights into complaints made against us as vets. Our goal with the episode was to help you find better ways to think about and live with the threat of the official board complaint, with the end goal being, as always, a happier vet career. We think we f...

Thanks to Heska Australia for supporting this very important series of episodes on mental health, resilience, and burnout prevention. Go to https://www.heska.com.au to find out about ways to re-imagine the way you run your in house labs and digital radiography.  Professor Gordon Parker AO is Scientia Professor of Psychiatry at the University of NSW. He is, amongst other things, founder of the...

Vicarious trauma, burnout, and living with the critic inside your head is supported by Heska Australia . It's time to re-imagine how you run your in-house pathology and radiography. Visit https://www.heska.com.au/products/lab-diagnostics/ to discover how.  In this conversation, we explore some ideas that we’re all familiar with, like how to live with those annoying self-critical voices that w...

Dr Justin Ward is a veterinarian and practice owner from the Gold Coast in Australia. He grew up in South Africa where he studied veterinary science before heading to the UK for a 5 years stint of locuming and travelling, eventually putting down roots in Australia.  After 4 more years of working as an employed vet, he had his first crack at practice ownership. In this episode, Justin shares h...

Other than conundrums around the legalities of labelling and wondering if you're allowed to stock any compounded meds for 'emergency use', drug compounding is probably not something that most of us give a lot of thought to. You pick a dose, write a script, and your patient gets what they need, right? Right?  But what about quality? Does someone regulate what goes into the meds you prescribe?...

Dr Hannetjie Van Zyl-Edeling is a counselling psychologist, mediator, author and artist, amongst other things. You’ll know that our goal at the Vet Vault is to help you create a sustainable and thriving life around your veterinary career. This is exactly why we HAD to speak to Hannetjie, because she believes that we can use our minds to help create our best life and find meaning, even in challengi...

Does it drive you crazy how you'll sometimes look at an X-ray image and you don't see anything significant, but then you send it to a radiologist and they come up with a long list of important things!? How do they do it?! Well, a lot of it is practice, but here's a secret - a lot of it is also just good technique. And these are techniques you can easily apply in your practice to take great images...

Dr Penny Thomas’ career has taken her from working as a nurse in a specialist clinic while she was doing her vet degree, to a stint in mixed practise after graduating from the University of Sydney in 2011, and all the way to gaining registration as a Specialist in Veterinary Oncology in 2019.  Penny is a member of the Veterinary Cancer Society and has also obtained her Memberships of the Aust...

Welcome back to another one of our clinical episodes. I decided to share this one today because of a case I dealt with just this morning. We had a cat in hospital with what was thought to be acute renal failure, but what turned out to be a ureteral obstruction. That's ureTEral, not urethral. Seeing this case reminded me how dangerous this disease is, and how easily it can be missed. So I thought I...

What do you think when you hear the words ‘holistic’, or ‘alternative’. What about "complimentary"? These are terms that can evoke quite strong opinions and responses in many vets one way or another, right?  100% honest - I was a bit apprehensive about doing this interview. I’m a natural skeptic, and I was worried that our guest was going to be a bit  ‘out there" in his ideas, but I’m ve...

A bonus episode from the Vet Vault Clinical ECC podcast. We deal with fat lips from bee and wasp stings on a daily basis in practice, but what about the more severe full-blown anaphylaxis reaction? It's a whole different kettle of fish! In this recent episode from the Vet Vault Clinical podcast, critical care specialist Dr Rob Webster talks us through treating the collapsed anaphylactic dog, inclu...

Our guest for today Is Dr Ivan Zakharenkov, or Ivan Zak as he’s better known. Ivan is a veterinarian and an entrepreneur committed to creating products that empower healthcare teams to live their passion. If you haven’t heard of Ivan then there’s a fair chance that you have heard of, or possibly use his brainchild on a daily basis in your hospital: Ivan was the founder of the now-ubiquitous veteri...

We’re back today with another full-length vet interview, and it’s a corker!  We’re exploring the ins and outs, the ups and downs and the and the joys and struggles of a career in emergency practice, with Dr Lorna O’Dowd. You’ll pick where Lorna cut her teeth in mixed practice from her lovely Irish accent. Since her early career in Ireland, Lorna did stints of smallies locum work interspersed...

This episdoe is a bit of a hybrid between our standard performance episodes and a clinical one. We speak to Dr Randolph Baral, who owns and works in a feline-only practice in Sydney, Australia. But Randolph doesn’t just like staying up to date with what’s new for his patients - he prefers to stay at the forefront by doing his own research. This has led to him gaining his memberships feline medicin...

I recently had the privilege to be interviewed by my podcast/business coach, James Whittaker. James is an author, film producer, entrepreneur, all-round great guy and host of the Win The Day podcast. We thought we'd share it with you here on the Vet Vault, because  A - If you're a podcaster and you get handed a well-executed pre-edited bit of audio then you'd be a fool not to use it. B - We d...

You know that virus that the entire world hates at the moment? Yes - the C-word. Well, us vets have hated it for a long time, because it’s been killing our feline patients relentlessly in it’s mutated form of Feline Infectious Peritonitis long before the rest of the world ever heard the name 'corona'. Well, that might be about to change...  In this episode, we share some highlights of a recor...

Dr Sarah Heath is an RCVS and European Veterinary Specialist in Behavioural Medicine and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 2018. She is an External Lecturer in small animal behavioural medicine on the veterinary undergraduate course at Liverpool University. In 2019 she gained her Postgraduate Certificate in Veterinary Education and became a Fellow of the Higher Educa...

We wanted to share one of the episodes from our clinical series of podcasts to give you an idea what they are about. This one is from a series we did on brachycephalic obstructed airway syndrome (BOAS) with specialist surgeon Dr Bronwyn Fullagar and Dr Mark Tenenbaum, a GP vet who works in a practice that has a strong focus on brachycephalics. Regardless how you feel about bulldogs and all their f...

Here’s the link to our brand new clinical continuing education podcasts: https://vvn.supercast.tech. Subscribe before the end of January 2021 to lock in your subscription at a 30% discounted early bird rate. Now - our guest:  Dr Mark Kelman is a man on a mission. He’s a veterinarian, independent scientific researcher, social philanthropist and investor who has had a wildly varying career. From cha...

Just a quick chat to say hi and let you know what we’ve been up to, plus Hubert shares an important letter that we’d received at the Vet Vault from a listener who is NOT a vet, but a client. You may need to hear this - I know that there are many days that I do.