I stumbled upon this website awhile back and found its contents especially interesting. I’ve yet to find a great resource for poisonous plants, and was impressed by their toxic plant section!
The site is full of visually pleasing infograms, summaries and overviews of diseases, conditions and their symptom check was quite interesting.
Want to kill a little free time and learn while doing it? Check out this site.
Occasionally, we have ride-alongs or people doing job shadows, usually students ranging from high school to vet school. For those considering a career in veterinary medicine or future ambulatory vets, it is an interactive, uncensored day-in-the-life experience. The types of questions I did not really expect to get were regarding commuting and driving. The questions I get asked most often include:
I’ve received these questions often enough that I decided to write a couple posts about this side of the profession from my personal experience.
Our service area (which I refer to as the realm) is vast, one of the largest I’ve seen. From where our office is located, we service up to an hour and a half in every direction…meaning our call radius is 1.5 hours, not factoring in traffic. The realm ends up being a large part of the western side of our state. While the majority of our work is North, an emergency an hour South of our office could mean a 2.5 hour drive from one end of our range to the other. Most practices I’ve spent time with service a 40 minute radius around their hub.
As for navigating the realm? I have to give a shout out to navigation apps. All of this would be a lot more difficult without today’s smart phones, GPS etc. I consider myself very fortunate to practice in a time when this technology is easily available. Not afraid to admit that I cannot imagine the farm call experience before Google maps existed. For the vast majority of our navigation, we use Google maps and Waze, which do a great job 95% of the time.
Luckily, our front office staff are all locals with an excellent knowledge of the cities/towns and road system. Equally important is knowledge about traffic. The commute to a particular barn in the morning could be well over an hour, while the same route could take 30 minutes if its around lunch time.
Efficiency requires concise, well-planned routes, the front desk carries the heavy burden of scheduling. And they are phenomenal at avoiding the big scheduling mistakes, which off the time of my head are:
I have full respect and appreciation for the skills of the front desk staff, because I dabbled in scheduling at my previous job and found it to be a pain-staking, hair-pulling mess.
Minimizing drive time is essential, as our farm call fees (ranging from $80-140) over times barely cover the overhead and wages one way…not to mention if the next call is equally far at the other end of our range. Often times, the company actually loses money as the basic, rough example below shows:
Farm call 40 miles from office, 1 hour drive time
Not a precise or perfect example, but easy to see why scheduling and routes are so important. And after all the effort is made into tactfully planning an efficient day, there comes an emergency call that changes it all…and even if the call is at the other side of the realm, traveling in peak traffic hours, those facts don’t register because the focus shifts to getting there safely and as soon as possible, so that we can do what we joined this profession to do- care for our equine patients and the clients attached to them.
I unintentionally discovered one method for ensuring you will not have repeat business from a client. And for the sake of showing my humility, while sharing my mishaps, I created a simple step-by-step guide on how to lose a client.
When my boss couldn’t make it to her appointment at a nearby barn, I offered to step in and help carry some of the appointment load. Not only was this my first time meeting the client, but it was also the same barn that I had visited earlier in the morning for an emergency colic appointment. This client had one horse scheduled for a dental and two horses scheduled for vaccines. Having been on emergency calls all night, and reporting to the Colic first thing in the morning, I never had time to get vaccines. When I agreed to take the appointment (Since I was already at the barn), I also realized I was out of tetanus, West Nile and flu/rhino vaccines. While my office staff arranged for the client to come to the barn at 11 am instead of 2pm, I embarked on what I thought was going to be a quick trip to the office for more vaccines. But phone calls, questions, client drop-in and various other events resulted in my taking an hour longer than I had hoped.
By the time I showed up at 12pm, the client had already called my boss to see what the deal was. She let me know what her wait time had been, and I apologized profusely. With a riding lesson scheduled at 1, she was skeptical I could get everything done in an hour. Determined to regain her trust and confidence, I promised I’d have it done.
I set up my dental equipment, vaccinated the horses and got ready to sedate the gelding for his dental. “Oh yeah, he doesn’t sedate well just so you know. He’ll look like he’s about to fall over asleep, but as soon as you start working on him he’s wide awake.” Let’s just say she knew exactly what she was talking about. And after I felt confident in his sedation level, I filled a large dosing syringe full of water from his dirty bucket. I put the tip of the syringe in his mouth, and as I shoved with all my might on the plunger…he almost reared up. It was perfectly coordinated and timed, and instead of the water going into his mouth…the water shot full-force straight into the client’s face.
Basically, she got a power-wash to the face and was soaked. She did not laugh. She looked absolutely pissed and annoyed. I told her I was mortified, and that I was sorry. To which she responded, “I’ve had much dirtier and nastier things on my face.” I laughed, and went to work.
What would’ve normally been a 15 minute dental float was a 45 minute struggle between a horse’s buckling knees and his frantic swinging head. By the time I was done, the client had her own client waiting to begin the riding lesson. Embarassed, mortified and disappointed by the multi-modal failure, I left one more apology with her before I drove off to the next appointment.
As soon as a left the barn driveway, I was dialing the office to give them the step-by-step account, and share my new found method to ensure that I’ll never be the vet she requests to work on her animals. We all had a good laugh before the office manager said, “Well, I doubt it cost us any money. She’s had an outstanding balance of over 3 grand for the past couple years and refuses to put a dime toward it.” She paused. “Maybe after spaying her point blank in the face, she’ll get the hint that we kinda want to be paid for our previous services.”
Despite her account delinquency and bad attitude in general, I still felt horribly unprofessional and foolish…though after talking with the Office manager, I felt a little less guilty.
#veterianrian #vet #vetmed #vetlife #equine #horse #equinevet #ambulatory #mobilevet #veterinarypractice #dayinthelife #doctor #profession #equineveterinarian
Memories, musings and mishaps of an autistic, mixed race, lesbian writer. Author of Approaching Autistic Adulthood: The Road Less Travelled (available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Approaching-Autistic-Adulthood-Road-Travelled/)
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