Gosh… that’s probably the longest break between updates. To be honest, I was surprised to find my blog still exists and hasn’t succumbed to neglect and the passage of time. Suffice to say, there are a few updates. Reading over past posts I realise what a valuable resource for me this blog is – I take a fair amount of photos but without text to order things and remind me of details that I would have forgotten if not for this blog. I’ll try to cover the last few years in as much detail as possible – perhaps I should split it into several posts? I’m not sure – let’s see how things play out. EDIT it’s going to be multiple posts, lol. It’s nearly 3 years after all…
Work
When we last spoke it was September 2021. I was employed, having returned to employment after the first lockdown and elected to work at my favourite site, W. However the pay wasn’t really suitable and certainly wasn’t enough to keep the cats fed. Plus I suffer from itchy feet. After 1-2 years in a place I start to get bogged down by local politics – I tend to emotionally invest in places if I stay there too long, which is fine except I then get frustrated when the ‘totally obvious’ changes I think need to be made aren’t made. W did allow me to locum on the side which kept me there longer than I’d usually manage, and they gave me new opportunities, though eventually I did have to move on. It was an amicable parting – I told the boss as I left that he was the only person I’d consider being employed by going forward (such a wonderful human), which is absolutely true, and I continue to locum for them as needed (though this is rare as they are so lovely they rarely suffer with staff shortages).
An opportunity came up at W to set up an emergency night service from October 2021 and I jumped straight on board, as did two colleagues (the minimum number of vets required to run a proper night service is three, working an average of 7 nights every 21 days). This left the day shifts understaffed so we also did a fair amount of day shifts when not working a week of nights as well. I loved nights, and working extra days too meant I was earning enough to keep the cats fed and save a little, which helped when the night service had to close in April 2022 (financially unsustainable sadly – busy and popular as they are, there was just not enough demand from one rural independent site to warrant it).
I took redundancy as I did not want to return to days, and returned instead to locumming, the world having stabilised again after the pandemic. I’ve been locuming since, and it suits me well. I do a fair amount of night and emergency day shifts (AKA out-of-hours – OOH) which are what I enjoy most, with some GP day shifts as top up when demand is low for OOH work. OOH shifts are long but they are variable between busy as hell and twiddling thumbs – animals don’t plan ahead well when it comes to getting ill or having accidents. I’ve walked into shifts with nothing waiting and nothing to do, and other shifts where I have 9+ in-patients, more on the way, and animals that require constant supervision. These shifts are usually sole charge (busier city centre sites can have multiple vets but I live near the coast so half our catchment is decidedly watery, thankfully – though watery means you get seals to treat occasionally) with one or maybe two support staff i.e. nurses, animal care assistants or receptionists. Most OOH shifts I do are me and one nurse, with 2-4 phone lines to manage plus in-patients, operations, whatever walks through our doors. I love it.
I like locuming – I get to see lots of different places and see how different people do things, and have a huge range of friends and acquaintances via work, people are generally happy to see me as I’m filling a need and am easy to work with (I think!), and hopscotching between different practices means I keep my itchy feet happy and generally don’t get mired down in practice politics or overly upset by the governance of higher ups, if they exist (I work for independent practices and two different corporates so I can’t get too hett up about any particular business model).
Most important to me is the autonomy – I am utterly in charge of when I work, and being both a valued relief worker in a recruitment crisis and an experienced vet (just hit 18 years qualified and 28 years since I first walked into a vet practice for work experience and got an after-school/holiday job there before I’d finished the week), I have enough confidence and legitimacy to, to some extent, dictate how I work also. If they don’t like that I have opinions, standards and protocols/policies of my own, or if I don’t like their opinions, standards or protocols/policies, I don’t work there again.
The veterinary profession is in flux. Corporate ownership has sky-rocketed since I first walked into my first local practice (ironically one of the first corporates) in 1996. The pendulum is currently swinging back with multiple independents opening up locally in the last five years, vets finally having access to Unite (union membership) a couple of years ago, and the first ever strike action occuring at a corporate vet practice in Wales last month. Stress within the profession continues to be so high that veterinary staff still have a four times higher than average risk of suicide. This risk isn’t new – Donald Sinclair, the vet immortalised in the character of Siegfried Farnon in the James Herriot novels, died of suicide. However the rates aren’t improving – we all know someone who is no longer with us due to suicide. We know many many more who left the profession to pursue something else. This constant loss from the profession means that no matter how many new vet and vet nurse schools open there is a constant need for new staff, but with the added issue that there are fewer and fewer experienced staff around to support these newcomers. Without support, they continue to leave. It’s a bit dire in places, whilst also meaning 100% job security for an experienced vet who can find a way to work through it.
I’ll try to leave this post on a positive ending. There are a lot of problems. However I love working with people who have exactly the same opinions as me re: animals. After suffering a recent loss (more on that later) it’s really hit home to me how supportive and caring all my colleagues in various sites, corp or indi, working with currently or not worked with since 2008 etc. are. They are amazing. We may have minor differences of opinions on whether birds are scary, hedgehogs are smelly, horses are sensible or mysterious creatures, whether cows, sheep and pigs smell bad or good, or whether dogs or cats are better, but how nice is it to turn up at work and know you’ll get a positive response to shoving your phone in front of a colleague and going ‘LOOK AT THIS PHOTO OF MY CAT, HE’S SO CUTE’. I bet people with kids don’t have that kind of surety.