layout: true background-image: url(../../images/slide_background.jpg) background-size: cover class: middle --- # Making Mistakes ### Long Quotes --- ### Quote 1 --- ### “… it would be a case of speaking with someone with more experience in the practice, talking about what I’d done and if they’d do the same or something better and then seeing if there was something I could have done to address it, e.g. actually, I should have given this cow and injection of X. Then phoning the farmer back up and asking how the cow is, and offering to go back to the farm and do it *(cont. ...)* --- ### – acknowledging that I could go back and do something more. And if there was something that I’d felt was the best at the time but realised later I had made a mistake it would then be a case of getting back on the farm fairly quickly, not being scared to go back, and not leave it hanging over me as a “farm I couldn’t go back to because I had an issue” --- ### Quote 2 --- ### “I’ve had a couple of disasters in my time and you feel awful and it’s difficult. Luckily, it occurred to me later on in my career. Not as a new graduate which would probably be quite a confidence wrecking thing, but at that stage I was quite experienced – I made a mistake - and killed the cow and the calf. *(cont. ...)* --- ### And that was one where I was lucky that the farmer was upset, but forgiving. I bent over backwards for a little while to make things right but maybe that was me trying to make myself feel better. But at the time, driving back – I probably wanted to get back home, go to sleep and try and forget about it.” --- ### Quote 3 --- ### “I found it very helpful with my mistakes to hear colleagues talk about their mistakes. I’ve been lucky to have some quite candid about their muck-ups and I try and make a point with vet students and new graduates – I don’t sort of lay bare all my worst mistakes, but if they’ve been in a similar situation I say, *(cont. ...)* --- ### “oh yes, actually once I did this and this happened and I’ve learned not to do it that way” or “I did this and this happened and it’s just one of those things don’t beat yourself up about it”. So I do try and make sure that all the younger vets and students hear my mistakes - if I can put them in a bit of a humorous light – I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. *(cont. ...)* --- ### I try to put a bit of a positive spin on it – at least it made a good story in the end, kind of thing. Even if it was a bit of a disaster, it worked out in the end – I’m still here, I’m still a vet, still enjoying my job. Things happen to everyone, things do go wrong, and that’s just the nature of the job. It’s not always going to go right.” --- ### Quote 4 --- ### “If I’ve done my best, and the farmers done his best, you can’t do anything more and you have to accept that sometimes. No matter how good you are, no matter how experienced you are, things do not work out the way you want them. And at the end of the day, if you start out with a live calf, it just has to kick its back legs, break its navel cord inside the cow and its dead in two minutes *(cont. ...)* --- ### - so the chances of something going wrong are pretty high in the situations in which we’re working. So you have to accept, yes, sometimes the outcomes isn’t going to be what you hoped for. You have to accept that, shake your head and say, “I know I’m not perfect, I know that everything isn’t going to go right every time”. *(cont. ...)* --- ### And you have to accept that sometimes it’s going to be not the right outcome. But if you can look yourself in the mirror and say, “well, I did everything that I could have in that situation”, then you’ve not right to feel down, feel depressed or that it’s your fault.” --- ### Quote 5 --- ### “We had a clinical club the other month, last month, we have this clinical club and we discuss surgery in bovines. And I felt it was very important to open up about the experience that I had when I made a backside of operating on a cow and I wasn’t necessarily given a great amount of support on it but in terms of the younger guys that were there who probably look up to me *(cont. ...)* --- ### and look at the level that I’m at just now and think, I want to be at that level, it was probably a good thing for them to actually hear that when I was two years qualified I made this mistake and I won’t make that mistake again and none of you guys should make that mistake as well because I’ve already made that mistake.”