Episodes

For such a seemingly simple sample there’s a lot you can learn from a urinalysis. Many of us also have a fair amount of uncertainty around much of the 'how' of urine sample handling, analysis and interpretation. It’s also the one bit of lab work where being good at in-house testing can make a big difference to the reliability of your results. We KNOW you’ll have had some disagreements at some point in your career about at least a few of the questions we answer in this episode, like fridge vs ben...

It's the end of the academic year, and around the world, thousands of final year vet students are facing the start of their careers. It's an exciting time with a lot of optimism, but likely also a fair whack of anxiety. There are so many major decisions to make, and you've heard so many scary stories about life as a vet?! This is why we're having this conversation with Dr Moriah McCauley. Moriah is on the other side of this breakwater between student life and vet life. Just more than a year out ...

In part two of our bonus FIP series Dr Sally Coggins - feline vet and FIP researcher - tells us about other potentially useful treatments, like mefloquine for FIP. This could be particularly useful if you are not in Australia or the UK with access to BOVA's legally compounded Remdesivir and oral GS44152. We also cover off on side effects of Remdisivir, as well as the practicalities of the treatment period, like how to help clients with painful injections, and speak to a vet nurse who treated her...

This two-part bonus series is an update on everything FIP from our clinical podcast series. There have been some major changes in this space over the last few months, most notably around the legal access to Remdesivir for animal use and the availability of an oral formulation of GS442524 in Australia and the UK through BOVA compounding. In this episode, we go to the front lines of therapy to create the most up to date FIP guide out there. We speak to Dr Sally Coggins, a feline vet and FIP resear...

Robert Pope is a British veterinarian, athlete and charity fundraiser. He is an elite distance runner, with a number of successes at the marathon and ultramarathon distances, including being the Australian marathon champion in 2015. In 2016 he completed a 422-day, 15,700-mile run (that’s about 600 marathons!) comprising more than 4 complete crossings of the United States, and became the first person to trace the route run by Tom Hanks' fictional character in the film Forrest Gump. Rob’s vet care...

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 perfect cytology sample. This time we’re going to look at it. And no - you shouldn’t just chuck it in one of th...

“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 believer that the more we know about the things that we fear, the less scary they become, so let’s f...

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 about. Routine pathology sampling is high on this list. How do we ensure that we get good quality FNA sm...

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 emergency and critical care specialist from Latin America - but I won’t ruin the story for you here - it’s...

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 happier pathologists!) From sample handling, preparation and storage, to what the ideal history looks li...

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 found the perfect guest for it. Dr David Tabrett is an emergency vet and founder and director of th...

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 Black Dog Institute, and Director of the Division of Psychiatry at Prince of Wales and Prince Henry Hospi...

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 we all carry around inside our heads. Our guests, Rhonda Andrews and Dr Louisa Johnson also introduce us to...

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 his experience and the lessons learnt from when this first venture didn't go according to plan. But it was ...

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? And can we be sure that the active ingredients are 'active' - are they doing what they're supposed to? Sur...

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 challenging circumstances. (And let’s face it - even the dream veterinary career will throw plenty of challen...

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 and interpret them like the pros. We did a series on tips for rads of the acute abdomen over on the ...

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 Australian College of Veterinary Scientists in small animal medicine. She has a keen interest in haematologic...

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'd share this episode that we recently did on the topic with our resident medicine specialist, Dr Da...

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 very glad that we took the time for this conversation. Turns out that, like me, and like you, Dr Gary Richter is ...

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, including the role of steroids, anti-histamines, and adrenaline. If you enjoy this format of continuing e...

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 veterinary software Smartflow. It was Ivan’s personal journey as a practicing veterinarian for 12 years th...

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 with volunteering in all sorts of exotic locations around the world. She finally put down her roots here ...

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 medicine, a pHD in clinical pathology, being a regular contributor on VIN, and authoring a string of public...