Episodes

You'll bump onto grief several times a day on an average shift at a vet clinic. But do you UNDERSTAND it? Do you face it head-on, or does it make you uncomfortable, so you run and hide when you see it coming? Do you even see it coming? Can you recognise the stages of grief in your clients and your co-workers? What about yourself? Did you know, for example, that when that client is lashing out at you and your team, it may just be that they are stuck in one of the stages of grief, and that with t...

Dr Riati Scarboroughis is a researcher at the National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship and a PhD fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD focuses on improving our understanding of the conscious and subconscious motivations behind suboptimal antimicrobial prescribing in Australian veterinary practices, and designing sustainable strategies to support better antimicrobial prescribing in veterinarians. Ri is particularly interested in the use of social norms and nudges to modify behaviour...

Culture. It can be hard to put your finger on it, yet in the setting of a vet practice, it permeates the work areas, floats into reception and beyond and ricochets off the walls. You can feel it when you walk in the door. Long ago I sat in the reception area waiting for my interview at a practice where I ended up spending many years of life. I distinctly remember sitting there and thinking: "I don’t like the feel of this place." It took me more than a decade to figure out that what I felt that d...

We chose to share this episode on mitral valve disease from our clinical podcast series (vvn.supercast.com) because I went into this interview thinking that, after 20 years in practice, I wasn't really going to learn many new things...I was wrong! Our guest for this series on canine heart disease is medicine specialist Dr Clint Yudelman, and in this series he talks us through so many critically important concepts, like differentiating the cardiac cough from the non-cardiac cough, when to start ...

Why does it sting so much when a client accuses us of ‘just being in it for the money”. I think it hurts because for most of us money is really quite low on the list of what drives us, so much so that we often actively avoid talking about it, especially in terms of our own earnings, like it’s a taboo subject. But the things is - it IS also about the money. For most of us, at some point in our adult life, it’s very likely that you’ll find yourself thinking: "Hey, I could really do with a little b...

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 ...

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 o...

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 resea...

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 car...

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...

“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’...

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 s...

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 l...

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 the ...

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...

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? Su...

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 haematologica...

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...