Opinion

There’s nothing like a weekend on call to generate some weird conversations. Many of my calls seem to begin with the answering service saying, “it’s a bit of an odd one this, but…”. One such call came…

Corporatisation of equine practice is a topic that divides the profession, with possible influences on work–life balance, client and job satisfaction, treatment costs and salaries

I have always made sure that I don’t stray into the realms of CPD in this column. Firstly, although I am quite good at one subject, there are more qualified people than me to write CPD articles, and s…

It is important to find a good work–life balance, and to put boundaries in place to ensure one doesn’t encroach on the other

My daily walk north of our village takes me down a track with a field on one side and a wood on the other. I say a wood, but when we arrived in the village 25 years ago it was a field just like any ot…

When I die my gravestone may well read “as ever… the late David Williams!” In the ambulatory referral practice I run, visiting about 40 veterinary practices around East Anglia, I always seem to be run…

Imposter syndrome is something everyone will experience at some point in their life. It is not a new concept, although only recently has it drawn the attention of the veterinary media. There have been…

With the responsibilities of all parties involved in the selling and purchasing of a horse so vastly mismatched, it seems obvious that anyone involved has to exercise extreme caution

Voltage gated sodium channels... pharmacokinetics of drug delivery... the difference between incidence and prevalence. Do we need to know all this stuff to be vets? So asked Tessa one of my first-year…

I have been following a vet student/young vet Facebook group recently and, well – how to put it… it is a pretty gloomy place. To say there is a negative slant on working life would be an understatemen…

The veterinary profession is slowly changing, but the skills of many nurses are still under-utilised, says Claire Woolford. She hopes changes to the Veterinary Surgeons Act will help address this

I have worked at many vaccination clinics in my career, from the humdrum beaches of Goa to the exotic high streets of Coventry. The key skills required are efficient clinic organisation, vaccine stocks…

There has been much talk about the standard of proof in the veterinary profession which seemed to begin with an interesting article in the Veterinary Record in January 2020 entitled “Standard of proof…

“There’s nowt as strange as folk” or so they say. And then there’s “Time’s a great healer” to boot. How many colloquial idioms can we string together, I wonder? Here’s the issue that got me thinking a…

It is difficult to say what makes a practice. There are so many contributing factors. Buildings, staff, clients, leadership, equipment, ownership: they are all a part of it. Then there are intangibles…

“Kills 99 percent of all known germs”, “kills 99.9 percent of all germs and viruses!” – we’ve got used to such advertisements for hand sanitisers these days, haven’t we? But where is the evidence behi…

It has been an interesting time reading the general press over the last few months. Recycled scare stories about the drop in COVID-19 antibodies in previously infected patients was finally put into so…

The United Kingdom is out of the European Union. The transition period is nearly over and, at the time of writing (mid-November 2020), it is not known whether the UK and EU will agree a free trade agr…

It cannot be very often that a child instinctively wants a clownfish from a swell of 28,000 Piscean potentials, or that one morning an adult wakes up and spontaneously says “I’ve just got to have a mo…

On 18 November, after countless rephrasings, deleting the whole thing several times and much self-doubt, I sent out a difficult tweet. “Last year, while on [The Great British] Bake Off I was bullied h…