atDove Blog | Veterinary Training Blog

Sometimes practicing self-care can feel the least accessible when we need it the most. When we’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, it can be hard for us to engage in problem-solving or planning. A written self-care plan can be a helpful tool when you need a reminder of some of the practices that serve you.

Self-care can be so fiddly. I was introduced to the concept of self-care in my social work program, and beginning there, my relationship with it has been multifaceted.

Five years ago, just shy of completing my first year working as a CVT, I would have told you that veterinary medicine was not for me and that resilience wasn’t possible in this field. I was working in a general practice (my first job out of tech school) and I was on the verge of leaving the field completely. Never-ending days, an ever-changing schedule, and feeling like I wasn’t being utilized to the best of my technical abilities had left me feeling as though I needed to explore other career options. But, on the advice of a very wise tech school mentor who encouraged me not to let my first clinical experience make or break my career as a technician, I submitted one last job application.

With staffing shortages across the industry, it's more important than ever to make sure you’re offering the best resources possible to your team. Offering thoughtful benefits that directly address your employee’s needs will offer them support, which will make it more likely for them to stay with your practice long-term.  

To any well-established veterinarian, it’s no surprise the high rates of compassion fatigue, burnout, and feelings of overwork in this field. The pressure and intensity within veterinary medicine were only further accelerated due to COVID and the ramifications of clinic overload, staffing, and the financial burden of increasing veterinary costs. Regardless of years in the field, it’s easy to see how the state of mental health is fast dwindling. As a result, the need to restructure how we approach training on the floor is profoundly important and necessary to foster resiliency in new doctors.

Pursuing an internship can be a complex decision that requires a variety of considerations. While four years in vet school is a highly intense, overloading experience when it comes to education, training, and exposure, the true experience gathered during a clinical year pales in comparison to the type of skill and understanding of the profession when in your first years of practice. With the limited exposure to certain specialties, lack of consistency amongst training of fourth years in vet school, and over-exposure to highly unusual tertiary referral cases at a university-based hospital over standard illnesses treated on a day-to-day basis, it is easy to see how one is still seemingly unprepared to hit the floor running when first hired at a practice.

Our Technician Training team, along with Debrah Lee, our Veterinary Well-being Program Director, and Monica Maxwell, our Chief Administrative Officer, have been working on a new kind of veterinary education. Traditionally, our educational efforts at DoveLewis have been focused on increasing our medical knowledge. It can be easy to simply focus on the hard skills of our jobs. As technicians, we perform medical math and critical blood transfusions with such keen repetitiveness that we can overlook other aspects of our profession- like personal and professional development.  However, our well-being and success as an industry are significantly impacted by our emotional intelligence, resiliency, and how we respond to conflict.  This led us to create a different kind of educational video series: B.A.R. on the Floor.

There is a lot that we are trying to contend with. For many of us, there’s an underlying sense of urgency and helplessness as we try to find something to control in this surreal, and often uncomfortable, new landscape. There are many different reactions we may be experiencing as a result of this including those mentioned in our previous well-being article:

We may be beginning to feel like we have more questions than answers. It is not unusual to experience a wide range of thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Some of these reactions may include:

Being a veterinarian is exhausting, isn't it? We need to care about so many things!