Hello everyone, it's Anthony Chadwick, welcome to another episode of Vet Chat. Really pleased today to have a slightly unusual, a bit of a teamwork thing er on today's. Podcast, we've got some of the team from Sanderson Vets over in Haswell, who were very highly commended in our green awards, recently, around all their actions on sustainability, so I wanted to er get them all together and find out what's going on, what they've been up to.

As well to encourage those of you who are listening who are going, hm, do you know what, we've seen all the things that are going on like the terrible floods in Tibet and Nepal, the terrible er disaster there, you know, we feel powerless, what can we do? Well, you know these actions that we do here can make a difference. So it's really exciting to have you all on, Richard and Hannah and Sarah, thanks so much for taking time.

I know how busy the practise is. And even more busy when you're on a 4 day week when you've had a bank holiday, so, yeah, perhaps starting with Sarah, tell us, the audience a little bit about yourself and then maybe a little bit of just briefly about what got you into sustainability. Yeah, so I'm Sarah, I'm the practise manager.

I've been here since day one, so 10 years this month. Qualified in 2021 as a registered veterinary nurse from Myers Core and Preston. So, really, I think what got me involved in it was recognising that veterinary practises can almost feel wasteful, cos obviously.

A lot of single use items, and we use a lot of resources, and being 24/7, knowing that we have a sort of a big impact on the environment from that, it was just trying to find ways that we could try and help it. I think it was an area that, you know, we do our best at home with food recycling, general recycling, and trying to bring that into practise to sort of help the environment as a whole. And you love of course being out in nature hiking, so I think that connection with nature is so important because, when you are in it and you enjoy it, you want it to continue to be a place where you can go to, don't you?

Yeah, for sure, like there's nothing more frustrating than when you're, Of a mountain, you see people discarding rubbish on the floor and things like that, you know, it all has ongoing impacts and, you know, blocking rivers and things like that, so you'd be surprised how much it can all, all have a small change can make actually a larger impact overall. Yeah, we've just had new bins put on the beach at Crosby and it's nice to see you know that things can't fall out of them quite so easily, hopefully people will use them. They're not going to use them, take their litter home because the litter that gets on the beach and in beautiful places ends up in the ocean and then we end up with all the issues around marine life as well, don't we?

That's it, yeah. Hannah, what about you, tell us a little bit about er your role and what you've been up to sort of professionally wise. Yeah, so, I'm Hannah.

I'm a registered veterinary nurse. Most of my career I have been a consulting only nurse, and I have been a consulting only nurse for 4 years at Sanderson Vet now. I've recently, kind of probably the last 1 or 2 years, I came back off maternity leave and I kind of was a little bit more interested in practise development.

And kind of just general sustainability. I think I read some things online and I was just kind of quite interested in it, so I kind of wanted to see how it would affect or be having an impact in veterinary medicine as well. So that's how I kind of started doing the sustainability things.

I became a green champion beginning of this year, I think now. And then I've also taken the lead on the investors of the Environment Green Award. Brilliant.

And then Richard, tell us a little bit about yourself. So much less interesting than than Hannah and Sarah really. Obviously I'm a 2009 graduate veterinary surgeon, RCVS advanced practitioner.

And set up the practise just over 10 years ago with the intention of sort of trying to build the practise that I wanted to work at for the people around me, and we went through this period where we felt very strategically that we wanted to become more structured and more organised, and part of that was recognising that we were doing a lot more at home than we were doing in the office. To be sustainable and my job very simply has been to empower the team, particularly Sarah and Hannah, to implement things from practise standards right across the sustainability, but we, we made a very set decision that I wanted to empower the team to, to make us as sustainable as possible, exactly in mind of what you said, which is that we see these, you know, not surprising increase in natural disasters and environmental impacts of what we do, we're in a consumer society. And anything that I could do to give our team the chance to give us the better, better sustainability we wanted to do and so, so my role has been very easy.

I said that's what I would like us to do, and then I've been able to delegate and step back and watch the team prosper and build that. And I think when we look at this, often the nurses are in such a great position. To look at sustainability on the obvious areas like waste, you know, how we can perhaps have practise managers using, you know more green energy and so on, so it's er it's great to have all of you here today.

I suppose I'd like to begin by asking with practise standards, did you look at all the sustainability requirements and did that kind of start some of the journey, have you done the sustainability practise standards er awards? Yeah, so I obviously going through the whole practise standards straight from hospital status and then onto the award section. I'm really pleased that they introduced the environmental side into it.

I think it's been, I think it does make people realise a sort of little things that you could put in practise that could make a big difference to the environment, and yeah, I think, I, I think the, the section's really. It kind of opened, it's almost felt like it opened up a can of worms because you realised actually how much you're actually doing, and then you start looking into it and you, you find another webinar or, or some in CPD on environmental, and it kind of just starts spiralling from there, so we just kind of, I kind of roped Hannah into. Into doing it with me, because it it it is so vast, it's such a, a huge area and there's so many things you can do as a practise to reduce your environmental sort of impact on, you know, and make it more of a positive thing, so, I think the practise standards thing has been, it it it's, it's, it's planted a seed essentially for us to start growing from that.

I think one of the ex-Presidents, Sue Patterson was very instrumental in bringing that in and and pushing it forward, so, and I, and I think you, you made a really good point because there's so much there. People get kind of overwhelmed by it, so don't start. So it is having one or two things that you can take on board and do so, how did that help you in sort of prioritising what were maybe the two or three things that you did, you know, off the back of the learning and and the suggestions from the practise Standards scheme?

I think a lot of waste management was something that we really kind of went for. We had special signage for everything, loads of different areas that people can dispose of different things. We've changed some of our consumables to be able to be.

Actually recycled now rather than just single, single use, and so I think that was a big thing that we started to do was a lot of waste management, and like segregation and things like that for, for the practise. I don't know if Sarah could think of anything else really major that we did in the beginning, but I think that was kind of one of them. I think the main thing for me was, I think these, like you said, these tasks can be really overwhelming and like, you know, you can look deep into it, and I think it was, it was understanding you needed to start small and appreciate you can't fix everything all at once, you can't just put a load of things in and expect everybody just to get on with it.

So it was identifying where was our most wastage usage and what small things could be put in. Something as simple as putting the recycling bins, even down to putting them in the right location so people weren't having to walk too far to put it in there because it made it so accessible. The other thing I think that it was something really minor was making a bee friendly clinic.

So simple as, you know, we had some sort of space out the back where we could plant some wildflowers and put some bee houses up, you know, it didn't cost a lot of money. And it was something really simple that you know, it was, it was little things, sort of tasks like that we started, and then obviously I think the other thing was to involve the staff as much as we could, so we obviously tried to introduce like our travel plans and whether you know the nurse rotas could be changed so that they could car share or walk to work, cycle to work schemes, things like that, so it was, the thing for me was, Was really the wastage was the main thing, probably followed by the anaesthetic gases as well, was the follow up from that and then seeing where our most wastage was coming from. But lovely with the bees as well because you know you go out for a little stretch in between concerts and you're seeing some bees buzzing around and beautiful flowers, albeit, You know, not for the whole year round, but I think it it does cheer everybody up because you can be stuck in a practise, you know, with the windows in some of the areas, so being able to get out is really good for even people's mental health, isn't it?

Yeah, and we were able to incorporate it into, you know, encouraging the other staff to participate, so it was quite nice to see some of the staff, er, probably the ones I didn't expect really to come forward and say, oh, I'll help with some planting, and they, you know, it became a team building thing towards the end because they just really enjoy it and even maintaining of it now, they all, you know, it becomes part of the thing for them and they actually really enjoy it, so it was really lovely to see. Yeah, I love that idea of, you know, going for the low hanging fruit and it is a journey and I think as you understand it more, then you start to go, oh well, can I get a bit more information on that, so it becomes a sort of virtuous circle doesn't it, you start doing more and more as you begin to, you know, enjoy and see the success of the small things that you've started with. Yeah.

I think a lot of it as well is about managing that sort of change, we made some very. You know, specific plans that we were going to change the way we managed our sustainability, and I think, both Hannah and Sarah what they did really well was implement small changes, small victories that people could do easily without barriers, overcome those little barriers and have little victories, and once they saw those benefits, it became much more accessible and much less overwhelming and much less frightening I think and, you know, sometimes the best ideas or some of the ideas come out of nothing. I was away in Wetherby at Idex Laboratories and I saw this amazing water machine, and pretty much came back and I said we must install this and we were able to put in a water machine that does still water, sparkling water, flavoured water, electrolytes, all these kind of things, plumbed in off the mains, and I checked on the way home to film this, this podcast today, we've saved just over 11,500 water bottles by using that machine.

Versus what we were all doing, which was walking over the road to buy a can of pop or a plastic bottle of water, we've seen that, we've saved 11,000 water bottles and on top of that, our staff probably, it's probably the best thing I've ever bought and I've bought CT scanners, arthroscopes, everything like that, the thing that I've most ever seen our staff excited about was a water machine. Well I love, I have in the kitchen the soda stream, you know, and instead of having to buy plastic sparkling water, you just give it a quick push on the top and you've got sparkling water, so I, I plastic, I think it was 13 billion single use plastic bottles, half of them are water. Water comes out of a tap, tap water is on the whole pretty good, you know, why are we buying plastic water bottles, it, it really is .

Economically it makes no sense, does it? Absolutely, and I think when we installed that water, I mean it was exciting for the team, but also we were, it was those little small victories which then opened the doors for, for the bigger things that has really then created, not just, I mean we were lucky we had two people like Hannah and Sarah who were great green champions moving things forward, but also a whole team then that believed that sustainability was worth doing. Brilliant.

And now I'm gonna ask when you've done your waste audits. Do some people still cheat and throw the wrong things in the wrong bags? Or are you getting back.

That's pretty. Yeah, I think we're better than we used to be, like Sarah said, we put different bins in different areas just to make it easier for people to use them. We have various bins everywhere.

We've even got small little bins in the consult rooms now that all the vets kind of peel the, the plastic bits off the syringe packets and the paper bits, and then we recycle those. So there's still a couple of ones, but I think it's usually when we're rushing around, running around, we just forget sometimes, but it has definitely got a lot better. And it can of course save a lot of money because if you're throwing a lot of stuff into clinical waste, which is very expensive to, you know, dispose of then it it makes sense from a financial perspective, would you say that it's made a difference?

One in, you know, general reduction in operating costs, but also, has that helped perhaps in in staff retention, do you think people are a bit more bonded to the practise cos they see that you're bothered about these things? I mean, I can probably answer this. I think certainly from an operating cost point of view, I, I don't feel that the, sustainability that we've followed for practise standards and we've just been awarded green in the investors in the environment.

I don't think it's cost us anything more than time and effort. In terms of our operating costs, I think that probably we're running lower than we were relatively, I think it's probably saved us money. And in the same case we've seen growth in the practise because when they organise the environmental day, we had clients coming to help us, you know, we did an environmental day and clients turned up and that's, bonding clients who are then going forward and spending money with the practise over years, not just, just short term.

And and telling their friends about the practise as well. Well, absolutely, and I think that's kind of, you know, it's a huge thing because we, we decided a while ago that we were going to really look at reducing our use of parasiticides, initially launched a free faecal antigen testing trial, so we would test any client's poo for free for faecal antigen testing. Was that the client's poo or the pet's poo?

I, I hope the pets do, but I did, I did a very good vet thing of staying away from the poo and leaving that to the nurses, but what we found with that was that people really bought into this idea that as a sustainable practise we weren't going to blanket pharmaceutical their dogs and cats, and they turned up with, we, we, we gained. 11 clients one morning, just who joined the practise purely because of that faecal trial, and that was as a result of the fact we were trying to reduce our use of parasiticides, so, yes, I think our operating costs are lower, I think our clients are spending more in better ways. And I think in terms of staff retention, we were talking about this earlier, I think the actual question is, and I, I posed it to Hannah and Sarah, if you were applying for a job now, would you look at the credentials of the practise for sustainability, and consider that as part of your job appli whether you were willing to apply that and both of them said yes, and I think, That probably speaks volumes really that I think staff now want to be good and want to be doing something positive for clients, for each other and for the environment, so I think all round it's a, it's a good recruiter and retainer.

We did a survey with Kinetic and most vets, you know, 80% plus were saying and nurses, well it was just a vet survey, sorry, so there weren't any nurses involved, but they were saying they were really interested in sustainability, doing things at home sometimes but weren't doing them. In the practise and they saw that as a gap and then also saw that suppliers weren't perhaps educating them enough around those things so it it's definitely you know what you're saying kind of agrees with what the survey was saying as well. I think from a, we have strategic partners so we, we make a strategic partnership list of companies that we work with every year, and one of the questions that we ask in our annual December review is, their policies on sustainability on how they source and how they supply, and that makes a big difference to how we buy drugs and buy consumables as well and I think that has to form part of it is control as best you can what's coming in, and then control as best you can what you're putting out.

Yeah. In fact, Vanessa, one of the judges, Vanessa Nicola, who's er a French vet working down in er the south of England, said how good your parasiticide. And parasites, you know, information and communications, how good they were, so it is also getting that information.

Over in a really clear way to clients because we can say it in the consulting room but then they go out to reception and say I don't really remember anything the vet said, can you explain it again? So great that you've got those, you've got those communications. And do you feel that, has that had a massive effect on your.

Sales of parasiticides, but does that to some degree, is that some degree offset by testing rather than just as you say blanket treatment. Again, yeah, I, I would say probably from my perspective when we, we, we very closely study all of the, the sort of an audit, those kind of things from a business perspective, we've only seen positive impacts of, of using less parasiticides financially. And more, more clients coming in and interested cos I think there's a lot of people who have a, a practise plan, a VIP plan and feel nervous about changing and, I, I always talk about Mike Willard, who's a famous gastroenterologist, now retired from Texas A&M, and he used to say in the webinars, if you get a chance, the three of you, do look up Mike Willard on the platform.

This lovely Texan draw, really, you know, very eminent gastroenterologist, but he would say, I will try the Texan accent, you can give me your marks on Tony. Anything I taught you 10 years ago was a lie. And I think that's the thing with the, you know, with I as a dermatologist use a lot of parasiticides in my time.

And As time goes on you realise hm, you know, obviously if you've got a really flea allergic cat then you have to treat that monthly or you know however way you treat it. But inevitably we probably did overtreat. And I think if we're honest with clients and say new research has come out, we realise we have to do things differently.

Most clients will accept that and you know you then move on to say well we'll test more, we don't want to miss worms, we don't want to miss fleas. But you know we shouldn't be scared of having those honest conversations with clients and saying we're now gonna do it a little bit differently. How did that transformation go, you know, I don't know what sort of VIP plan you had before, but how did that sort of, what was that sort of progression of change from if you had a VIP plan to now changing it to something different, how was that communicated and how was that?

It sounds like it was well received by the clients. I mean I think in itself that's probably a whole other webinar in terms of, of that transition and I think. You know, in reality what it was was looking at what we wanted as a team, as with all sustainability stuff actually, what did we want as a team or we wanted to reduce our use of parasiticide because we thought that was better for patients and better for the environment.

Let's do something with removal of the barriers, and I talk a lot about this in my role with Idex, it's about removal of those barriers, so, you know, let's take away the fear, let's take away or manage the costs, and let's really reinstill confidence in the clients to trust. And we do the same with, you know, Sarah and Hannah implemented an idea to narrow down how often we had deliveries from, for example, wholesalers, so rather than getting daily deliveries, we try and get weekly deliveries. There was a management there for clients, those clients had to be told, hey, there may be a slightly longer wait for your drugs or we may need to stock slightly more drugs, but this is overall better for these reasons and I think communication and how those things are implemented with management of barriers is, is always the way.

There seems to have been a kind of bit of a loss of trust in, in vets and vet practises whereas this is, you know, helping to kind of Build it up by honest communication, isn't it, sorry, Sarah, back over to you. Sorry, yeah, I was just gonna say I think clients are more increasingly aware about vets, I think, I think you're right with the trust aspects, but I think as long as you communicate the genuine reasons, then I think they're more likely to accept, sort of that side of it, like they, you don't just say, for example, we don't say oh we're just doing this because we're environmentally friendly, we're actually demonstrating it to them. About what we're doing and empowering the staff to have that communication with the clients, so, you know, the, the guys on the front desk or the pharmacy staff, they can explain to clients, the reasons behind things or like Richard said, if, if we are having a slight delay because we're trying to reduce how many deliveries we're having, you know, just being transparent about it, and the reasons behind it, you know, clients are actually more likely to trust you.

Because of, of, of that openness, I think if you try and hide it behind something else, they, they're more, they get more nervous around that and less likely to, to either continue coming back or, or be open with you about their own pets, so we've we've empowering the staff to be able to speak about it, makes a, it makes a big difference in the communication. I also think, again I, I don't have anything to do with this and Hannah and Sarah can probably give you more information on this, but the facts are the facts and what we see when Hannah and Sarah have been doing the auditing and preparing for investors in the environment is, we can see clear evidence that our footprint is reducing, right, I think that's, yeah, that's what we're seeing week on week, right? Mhm, yeah, it's actually reduced, so when we were doing the investors in the environment audit, we basically, Got all our resources, put it into a spreadsheet, monitored it all, and we use 2023 as like a baseline, so we went kind of backwards in time, had a little look at what was going on, and actually, yeah, we have got a lower carbon footprint from our baseline in 2023, and I think clients really like that, just generally being honest about things, not just medica and you know, like medication wise or anything, just in general being a genuine, open, communicative person.

And then, yeah, they'll they'll be a bit more receptive to things. And then it also fits in with things like antibiotic usage, you know, are we reducing that, are we making sure that when we are using antibiotics, we did something with rumour in November and it was very much how many people are still giving antibiotics to, diarrhoea cases and even cat abscesses which, you know, the again the kind of rules and the evidence has changed, you know, we're we're less likely to need drugs in those two particular cases and yet there are some. Vets out there who would, you know, still feel that they needed to use those drugs.

And as a profession as things are changing and as things are developing with, with everything politically and otherwise, the reality is we are going to have to be as a profession, better at valuing our time and our advice because, Everything else is going to be a little bit different and a little bit difficult and. Selling medication, whether it's needed or not, is not going to be as lucrative an income as it has been over the past 20 years, so we have to sell our advice and our advice is on our trust, and, you know, I think that's key really and I think clients care, I think this is a big thing with environmental sustainability, clients care, they, they want to use the vets who are doing what they can to be sustainable. Yeah.

I noticed a lot of our clients do really care, like when we did our environmental day, quite a few of them did come or donate things to us and I think we have a, a strong client base here and yeah, they really do care, even if it is just little things that we're doing differently. I noticed again in your er report that you sent to us that you've been quite successful also in reducing your anaesthetic gases as well. How has that gone with the low flow anaesthetics?

So yeah, we implemented the use of low flow anaesthesia in obviously clinically appropriate settings. I think it's mainly because a lot of the vets were interested in better pain relief or local anaesthesia techniques and then that kind of linked in with the low er flow anaesthesia. I mean anaesthesia gases are always going to be our biggest kind of resource that we use and unfortunately it's quite high on our carbon footprint as well.

So yeah, I think it was quite a joint effort with all the vets and the nurses because they have been reading about different techniques of local anaesthesia, pain relief, and then, yeah, using low flow anaesthesia for different patients, it's better for the environment. Are you actually collecting the aniser the isoflurane or sevoflurane in the canisters yet? So that's there's a company called Sage Tech that is now collecting those, they can then be disposed of but they can also actually.

They're in the process of of recycling so you can use the isoflurane or sevoflurane again so it's perhaps an area for er, We always say there's always another step, isn't there, so yeah, look at age tech and see if they can. We we are, I would, I would call that an in progress, it's definitely something we've looked at, but I have looked at an alternative, which I'm just gathering information on which could be a little bit more exciting, but I won't say too much about that quite yet. Yeah, because the team don't know yet.

It sounds like if you told me you might have to kill me so it's probably best. But Moving on just to you specifically Hannah cos I know you're doing so much also outside of er the veterinary practise with your biodiversity work, perhaps tell us a little bit about that to, to kind of draw things to a close. Yeah, so we implemented an environmental day, I think I mentioned it a little bit earlier and that was basically to, we had some spaces around the building and.

They weren't the best, they were kind of all got rubbish and things everywhere. It wasn't the nicest, so we gathered all the team, some clients as well, and we had some local people come, like companies coming to kind of volunteer their time and efforts really. So we had a lovely day doing that, and now we've got a lovely kind of bedding thing at the back with all like nice plants in and it's all like wildflowers and things, so we did.

That for our environmental day. I've also been in talks with some local community flower planting and tree planting and things, so we wanted to do a tree planting kind of group day. We actually missed the tree planting time this year, so I think it's going to be the end of the year or beginning of next year.

So we kind of want to incorporate that into a team activity. I've also been in talks with a local community called Heswell in Bloom, and they basically do all the plants and all the flowers for, Heswell. They're basically just volunteers that just make Heswe look nice.

So I think we're gonna try and do something like that as well. But they're the main things that I've been kind of thinking of at the moment that we're in talks of doing. We were with the tree planting, we were gonna almost do it like in memory of some patients, you know, patients that we've looked after, kind of something nicer for the clients really.

Brilliant, just er for your diaries, first of October we're going up to Brockholes near Preston, because as part of the Veterinary green discussion forum, our event that we run at a nature reserve or an area of natural beauty every year, the money that we raise from that event, if, if, if there's a profit, it goes to working with Lancashire Wildlife Trust in in conjunction usually with a landfill company. And so we're we're rewilding about 20 hectares of meadow up at Brockholl so hopefully a couple of the team from Sanderson Vets can come up and help sort of sow some seeds, but also we're gonna have a bit of a lunch and a chat and a few talks, so it'd be lovely to see some of you there as well. First of October, if anybody's listening before the first of October and very keen to come then er get in contact with me as well.

I certainly think we can arrange for some of the team to come. Brilliant. I'll be interested in that, yeah.

Excellent, good. Well, listen, you know, I, I'm really inspired, I've I've had a day of doing podcasts and it's so important to fill yourself up with, you know, really inspirational people like yourselves who are doing fantastic work, you know, it it it helps I think with the Green Awards that people can then see that all of these things are. You know they're not super difficult to do, you need to be organised and everything, but these steps are really important and they make a significant difference.

And I think cheer everybody up if you can go outside and see a few wildflowers as well, I think that's good er for mental health as well as biodiversity and sustainability. So thanks for the amazing work that you're doing and I'm glad you're enjoying your membership of Webinarvet as well. Well thank you as well for also, I think you know from my side I've been a very good delegator in all these matters, but I think a thank you really from me to Hannah and Sarah for all their hard work, but also to you guys, Anthony at the awards and, and for the sustainability because I think the more people that are talking about it, hopefully the more practise owners like me are willing to support it and I think you know, My advice to all practise owners is find the people in your team that can do it better than you because we have great people in our team who can do things far better than I can, and the more these conversations happen between people like Sarah, Hannah and yourself, the, the easier it is for people like me to facilitate that, and to really improve the profession's footprint, not just our own local one.

Yeah, and to become an environmental exemplar for other professions to follow cos if we as vets who love animals, you know, both domesticated and wild, are not interested in in looking after the environment then I have to wonder, you know, which profession is going to do it. Yeah. Agreed.

Thank you so much and thank you, yeah, I think as Richard said, you have done both of you, Hannah and Sarah, a fantastic job in in organising this, and I think it is a real blessing I'm sure for him that he can do that sort of facilitation and the strength of, of starting your own practise is to find cleverer people than yourself, and I think you've managed to do it, Richard, so well done. Absolutely, absolutely. Well thanks everyone for coming on.

It's been great having the three of you on to chat and really love that enthusiasm and as I say you're really inspirational for me, so thanks for, Filling up my enthusiasm banks as well. Thanks so much. And thanks everyone for listening and hopefully see you on a podcast or a webinar very soon.

Take care.