layout: true background-image: url(../../images/slide_background.jpg) background-size: cover class: middle --- # Supporting other and younger vets ### Medium Quotes --- ### “I’ve had students in the car with me for the last 2 days. I always take great care to tell them that when they are new graduates, they need to make sure that, whilst it’s an all-encompassing job, they need to make sure they can take their minds somewhere else. It’s extremely important - when you have time off, take your mind somewhere else.” --- ### “… it does help to see the bigger picture when you’ve feeling demotivated. You know, no-one wants to do a job that involves getting up at two in the morning and driving to a dark farm and do a stressful operation on a cow. But the bigger picture is that you’re an important part of the rural community, providing a vital service that people really value and they look up to the people who provide that service.” --- ### “I’ve worked with younger vets, talking to them a lot, talking about cases that they’ve seen. Going out with them if they’ve asked for support. But making sure that they have the opportunity to do things for themselves, so they gain confidence. Talking about failures but also talking about successes as well to remind yourself you can do things.” --- ### “I think it’s very important in the first couple of years that they start to have the support from senior vets when something goes wrong, they need somebody to pick them up and say, yes, you might have made a mistake but just learn from it and try not to repeat it. I remember when I was young and in a career one of the senior vets said there’s nothing wrong with doing a mistake once, but it’s stupid to make a mistake twice and that’s stuck sort of stuck with me. I thought that was helpful.” --- ### “We encourage them to be nice people. Farmers don’t look down on young vets, female vets. He’s more worried that you’ll look down on him. Treat farmers as equals, give them respect. Listen, slow down. Ensure the farmer knows you’re listening to him. Appreciate the knowledge that they (the farmer) have. They just want to be able to trust you. They all know that if someone can’t do it, they phone up the practice and someone else will do it, we don’t charge extra for that.” --- ### “When I qualified it was easier to know everything. You can’t know everything now it’s harder for them now. They know more about what they don’t know. More a grown up, professional world now. But the fundamentals haven’t changed. I think that if people were supported, they would do better.” --- ### “We’ve got two new grads here and I feel like they were in that situation, I would want them to phone me or to speak to me or even just to text me. You know, if they didn’t want to talk over the phone, just to send me a text me and I’d like to think that everybody would have that support from their clients or from their colleagues.” --- ### “We try and talk it through with them when it does go wrong. We have these high achievers as younger vets coming through within the practice system – we try and talk it through with them and give them the support they need to get through.” --- ### “I might even take them out, not to that farm, but to a farmer I know well and say, look this is the way you do it, just to get their confidence back up again. You can’t molleycoddle them too much – they have to have a wee bit of stress and responsibility – they’re professional people and they’d paid good wages so with that comes responsibility and they have to get on with it.” --- ### “I think in some practices, if you don’t get that support, it has the opposite effect, you lose your self-confidence completely. So, it’s really important to provide that support early on and then slowly taking away the scaffolding.” --- ### “Good for new graduates to know there’s a protocol. I’m only 18 months. I attribute the confidence I have now with the support of the practice and they’re raised a lot of interns and introduced them into clinical practice. I’m sure that experience helps definitely, in the options to help new grads.” --- ### “we’d go with them and support them through that … If there’s two calls we’d send them to the easier one, shield them from the tasks and farmers that we know is more difficult. Until they regain that confidence again.” --- ### “it’s more important just to listen – let them get it all out first, and then say, “I’ve done that, felt like that”. And then I usually say, it’s only a mistake if you didn’t learn from it, what would you do differently, what would you do next time?” --- ### “if you want to hire a new graduate, you must have one or two people in the practice who have gone on a mentoring course, trained in how to mentor, how to teach so your new grad gets the proper support because there’s nothing more that kills the enthusiasm of a new grad quicker than not feeling supported or taken care of and it’s something that as a profession we do absolutely atrociously and that’s why we are losing so many at 5 years out.” --- ### “We wouldn’t take our assistant out by the arm and humiliate them! We’d discuss where we could have done something different or what they should do the next time. But we try to get them out there pretty quickly again, so it doesn’t fester. Get them to go out to something fairly simple, and get them well primed beforehand so they’re going well armed to gain that person’s confidence again. Everybody makes mistakes but it’s how you handle them.” --- ### “we went through what had happened and she came out with me a couple of times and see how I approach the farmers and if we get the chance to do one or two of these things together (fairly straightforward tasks on farms, not high powered surgery) and once we got through that, just a question of setting an example, be sympathetic to people who don’t have that level of experience yet. Same as learner drivers. We were all there once.” --- ### “When you’re the new graduate you feel like you’re the low hanging branch and you put up with the lesser unwanted jobs – taking tusks off pigs. And I think – I say this to our intern - you can’t do everything but you are a qualified vet and you’re absolutely useful and wanted and valued.” --- ### “It also comes back to training and experience and a little bit of a push but not getting thrown in at the deep end so you can improve your skills and build … and people skills – communicating with the farmer.” --- ### “There’s an intern programme in our company and I think it’s brilliant. I didn’t do an intern programme and I did get pushed into the deep end and it was very scary and I didn’t enjoy my first year in practice but I learnt by my mistakes.” --- ### “If it’s a team, If everyone works together, then if there’s a bad outcome, it’s like the whole practice has failed rather than the individual involved. And if new grads know there’s help and support there if they need it. But equally not being over confident and asking if they need a hand. It’s best to tackle that before they get into that situation rather than having to deal with it after they’ve got into a sticky situation.” --- ### “We try and work it that one of the two of us practice owners will have the phone and be available to be contacted by the younger vets who are on duty to talk things like that through over the phone initially. And if it’s sounding too complicated say, “right, hang fire, we’ll be there in 20 minutes” or whatever it takes.”