Hello Anthony Chadwick for the webinar vet, yet another podcast, really lucky today to have Paul Mantalo on the line who is the principal of vet services at the PDSA. Paul's a graduate of Glasgow vet school, also has a master's in wild animal health, and also did an MBA as well. Fantastic work that the PDSA always do.

It's a charity very close to my heart. I used to see practise at Liverpool with Chris Simmons and Ann Robinson and obviously the big centre down in Haighton as well, which does a lot of the out of hours work for the Liverpool area, so. An amazing charity, great to have you on board, Paul, and tell us a little bit about what your job actually entails.

Yeah, it's great, great to be here. Thanks for, thanks for inviting me on. So my role at PDSA is, I've got, I kind of got two hats on, I guess.

So we, have split the country into three, so I run all the operational veterinary services down in the south of England. I've also got Wales and Northern Ireland thrown in there as well. So, operational service delivery is a big chunk of my role.

The other hat I wear is a, a strategy role. So I'm set on the senior veterinary strategy team, and we're looking at developing, you know, the veterinary service for the future. So looking at business development and looking at the various different projects that you would expect to have in, in an organisation of that size.

So it's that, that kind of really nice mix between operations and strategy, which are two very different hats to wear and two very different mindset. Set. So, yeah, it's really engaging.

It's, it is a very interesting role, and I've been doing this for, yeah, quite a few years now. I've moved into this specific role, in 2014, but I've actually been with PDSA since, oh gosh, what's it, 2003? So, yeah, going on 1818 years now.

But in different roles all through my career, so it, it doesn't feel like I've been, been in the same job as it were, even though I've been in the same organisation. And presumably you found the NBA so useful, you know, within the operational side but also within the strategy side. What, what were your thoughts on an MBA and perhaps people, you know, who are vets or nurses thinking about going more into.

You know, the sort of strategic or, or more operational away from being an actual vet or a nurse. Is that something you would recommend people think about and do? Yeah, 100%, and I think the way, the profession is shaped, I mean if you look at the landscape of the profession, especially with the corporatization, there's these big, you know, kind of structures now, there is so much opportunity for, for vets to, to kind of progress into different roles.

And for me, I mean, I worked for PDSA as a. Vett in the real cut and thrust in, in the busy East London hospitals for about 4 years. And then I was like, oh, you know, what, what, what next?

I didn't want to do a certificate. I mean, I did a GP cert in ophthalmology, but I didn't want to go down that clinical specialisation route. And, so I kind of, like, started looking towards, the management side of being, being a head vet, and I actually got, got a role in Southeast London in New Cross.

So what, what is the dark side of, of management, if you like. Leadership. And, and it's from that that I started, doing my, my MBA because I, I recognised that actually that role could be a springboard into a number of different roles, senior roles, either within veterinary or outside of it, because actually, once you get to a point in leadership, you can transfer those skills, across to different organisations.

And it wasn't that I didn't like being in the vetting profession, it was like I, I, I, I've always been driven to look for something else, or, or, or be, I'm Always quite ambitious in that sense. I've got a busy mind, people that know me will tell you. So, and, and, and I just saw that as an opportunity.

So I actually did my MBA on, on the job, if you like. So I was working as a, as a head vet, at a hospital. And all the things that I was learning around operational management and, and finance, and, and, you know, marketing were really, really kind of, you know, applicable to what I was doing in the role.

So I found that really, really good way, of studying. And then obviously as we restructured PDSA in 2014, this role came up, and I'd worked as an area manager for a little bit as well, and, and put some of that operational, strategic management in place. So this role came up and it just, it just seemed like a really good fit.

So, even though I was kind of getting itchy feet career wise, if you like, the opportunity started to present within the organisation that I was already working for. It's nice if you're in a big organisation, there is that opportunity to progress, isn't there, but . I, I suppose at each level you almost need to learn new skills and forget some of the old skills that got you to the stage you're at.

I, I read a book called The E Myth by a guy called Michael Gerber and it's very much about working on the business than in the business, and often, you know, as a vet, we, we qualify, we're very good tactical, technical people, you know, we know how to do the job. And then as we progress we become managers. But of course we're not trained to be a manager and so, you know, it's so important to learn those skills, cos otherwise you are, you're, you're always gonna have the same sort of tactical, technical way of doing the job, which means you don't .

Delegate very well and things like that, so each, each level you've got to learn new skills and, and lose the old skills to some degree, cos otherwise it complicates it, doesn't it? Yeah, if there's one thing I've learned, I actually did my er MBA dissertation on, you know, I think the title was do do vets have the mindset for Leadership. So, and it was looking at my own personal journey into leadership and some of the challenges that I'd had, but if I was gonna summarise that whole thing, it was actually we, we, we graduate and we've got a very kind of scientific and logical and evidence.

Based brains, but that's just not how people work, you know, you can't, you can't apply a rational logical solution to what inevitably as a leader you will face, which is a, you know, an emotional situation. So actually, you know, part of, leadership is, is understanding that, you know, people are people and they, they don't react in that logical way that you would expect them to. But, but, but for me, that journey and and learning about, you know, the various different aspects of leadership have been.

You know, not only good in, in my professional life, but also in my personal life as well, you know, once you can see the range and spectrum of, of how, how, how to work with people and the different, facets of being a leader, you start to learn quite a lot about yourself and how you react and what drives you as a person as well. So it, it has been, it's been an interesting journey. But I, I, yeah, I, I, it's not for everybody, I would say.

But I think I have seen. A lot of vets go into leadership roles, face the challenges that you inevitably face and, and, and think, do you know what, it's not for me. And so they, they, they pulled back from it, which is a real shame because I have been challenged on, on, on this phrase before, but I always say, you know, leadership is a is a series of failures.

And it is, cos you have to learn how to fail. And and and it's only by failing that you learn how to do things a little bit differently. But as vets, that's not a, that's not a good concept for us.

We don't like that thought, . So, I have been corrected in the past and, and I've been told to, to change that phrase to, it's a series, you know, leadership, a series of opportunities to learn. But, but I think you definitely feel like you're failing as you're doing it, especially as a new leader, and I think that's OK, you know, it is, everybody feels like that when they go into a.

Well, we grow and learn the most within our failures when life is going very easily, you know, there's no real pressure to transform, and I think we've seen that probably. Most of all in the last year when, you know, a tiny little virus has caused amazing digital transformation, the way that we actually, you know, do the job has changed dramatically. I know, you know, you were telling me about the number of consults that you've done, you know, not in a physical sense in a virtual sense over the last year.

So maybe talk to us a little bit about what . What the coronavirus has taught you and how it's helped maybe to develop the PDSA in this new digital decade that we've just started. So yeah, I mean, our response to, to the initial kind of pandemic was like everybody else, you know, we have to keep people safe.

So we sent a huge proportion of our teams home. Now we'd always had strategic plans to look at, digital and remote consulting, you know, we had those strategic plans in play. But looking at, you know, it's a big ship to turn as an organisation like PDSA.

So we were looking at strategic plans that were looking like, you know, 23 years, in development, and, and we had to put systems in place in 2 weeks. That, that was the, that was the speed and pace that we, we had to work at. But, as a consequence of that, you know, we've managed to deliver over 600,000, you know, remote consoles.

In 2020, which is phenomenal, and that is people that haven't been using that technology before, that's clients not using the technology before, and, and we delivered that and we managed to treat in in total, 400,000 pets in 2020, which is absolutely phenomenal. And they, these are cases that don't go away, you know, just because you're in a pandemic, pets still get sick, you still have emergencies. So we managed to mitigate the risk of the pandemic from an animal welfare perspective on that scale, which is amazing.

And we did that, you know, in the context of our income, we dropped hugely. We were, we finished the year, I think, about 25 million pounds, you know, lower in income and funding that we would expect. But we've still managed to do that and come out of that looking at now investing in.

You know, more, more veterinary teams because we don't know what the future's gonna hold, but it's, I think most people can probably predict that we're going into some recession, in which case the demand for charitable veterinary services is only gonna go up. And we have to step up and do what we're here to do. Our purpose is to, is to make sure no animal suffers at the time of crisis.

But looking back at the last year, I mean, it has been. Absolutely phenomenal what what our teams and and and and vets across the profession have have pulled together and done, and we are good at that as a profession, we get on and we get on and do the job. But as I say, the fact that we, we flipped a face to face model where we were delivering hundreds of thousands of face to face consults a year, straight into a remote consult was absolutely phenomenal.

It's been exciting. It's been terrifying and we've got a huge amount of work to put all the systems, structures and processes in place to support what we're already delivering because, you know, people do it and they do it cos it's what they have to do, they step up and do it. But ultimately, it, it, it is hard, and people burn out and people, you know, find, and, and we're seeing that across.

The profession, people are hired and, fed up, you know, so the next challenge I see in 2021 is to deliver that, what, what we've been delivering, but somehow motivate people into, into understanding that this is, you know, the, the right thing to do, and, and that it's a good thing to do. Cause we all know it deep down, but it doesn't make it any easier when you're doing it day in and day out. I think that's been the thing, you know, across a lot of professions, obviously the NHS with the vets as well, teachers, the doing the job in a different way will have added stresses and strains, and I think there will be a burnout.

And as you say, we're moving potentially into a, into a, a depression, recession situation where, as you say, your services will be. You know, needed even more and, and perhaps that's where the cleverness of, of using the telephone and the digital consults to actually triage, so that you're not bringing people in who are then taking up a slot that perhaps another animal needed more. There's gonna be a lot of that developing, isn't there, over the next year.

Yeah, I think as a profession, we, we, we take a long time to embrace new things. We've been forced to, but you know, you know, as we sit here today, having the evidence of 600,000, you know, remote consultations with no, appreciable adverse effects on animal welfare, you know. For, for me is, is a big test, and, and, you know, we can't ignore that and, and everybody around, you know, around the country has, has got similar numbers when you start adding them all together.

So we do have to do things differently, I think, in the future. But it was interesting what you said, you know, what we were saying about engagement. I did look at this, obviously we're doing a lot of work with our teams on wellbeing.

And I saw, I think it was from Best Companies, this really interesting graph on human emotion after a, a large scale event. And at the start of of these kind of catastrophic events, you get this really er everybody really pulls together, you get this hero phase of camaraderie. We're all in this together, adrenaline's up, everybody's engagement's really high.

And that's what we definitely. They saw at the start of the pandemic, everybody was willing to just do whatever they could, to get on with the job in hand. But then you have this really long disillusionment phase where emotion, motivation, morale all all drops, and it hits like the all-time low, which is definitely what I was seeing, with, with my teams starting towards, you know, the end of summer.

And then, then you, you get a, a gradual build. So it does start to get better, but within that build there's these things called trigger events where something will happen and you'll get another dip in, in, in morale and motivation. And these trigger events could be anything, a family birthday cancelled, a wedding cancelled, a holiday cancelled.

And then you get a year after event, and this is the really interesting bit for me, a year after the event you get this anniversary event which. Is usually like a big trigger. Now, at the start of the pandemic, at the end of March, March the 28th is my anniversary event, and that's when the pandemic started for me, because that's the day I went into hospital with coronavirus.

And I ended up in ICU for a few days. And I haven't really considered what March the 28th is gonna feel like in 2021, a year after that event. But we're all dealing with these, these trigger events and these anniversary events now for the next few months, and this.

Will be a really important time for everybody, you know, whether you're an employee of an organisation, whether you're an employer, whether you're a leader, to just, you know, consider, we're all human, we're all going through this together. It's nobody's fault. We are where we are, but we have got, I think, a, a rough few months or weeks ahead of us, because we're starting to hit all those anniversary events.

And it's only when I looked at this graph I reflected and I thought, oh, I wonder what I'm gonna feel like on March 28th, and I hadn't even considered it up until this point, so it will be quite interesting. Oh well, and thank God you've come through it so well, you have youth on your side, Paul. I don't know if I'm not young.

But yeah, I mean, I was young, fit, healthy. I didn't expect in a million years, you know, to, to end up in that situation. And, and I bounced back really quickly and I, I, I almost feel that, I mean, I, I do quite a lot of, you know, personal wellbeing and meditation, and I look on, on anything now as an experience.

So I don't, I don't kind of, I don't create trauma or dra, you know, or, or, or stories in my head around that experience. It is what it is. But I still think that my experience is better than a lot of people's who, the thought of having long COVID, for instance, I, I just, my heart goes out to people that have, ultimately got long chronic conditions as a result of that, which I, I don't.

I have occasional chest pain, occasionally because I came up with quite a. Of pneumonia for a week, but I'm, I'm doing, you know, fitness exercise more, more than, you know, any, well, as much as I was before, so I'm, I feel like I'm, I'm fairly good, but it's, it is, it is the mental effects as well, isn't it, that, that, that we, that we need to consider. Well, being in an ICU is a scary place, isn't it?

It is, and it was right at the start. It was right at the start, so it was, you know, people didn't know what they were dealing with. And what, what, what really got me, and it's, it has gotten me throughout this whole experience of the pandemic, is we've stripped a lot of the humanity away from people's experience.

So I was in ICU with plastic sheets everywhere that they were, you know, swelling down and, and, and unfortunately I did see. People that, that didn't make it out of that situation in hospital. And it was just all the, you know, the, you know, sometimes we think that, you know, the back of house, veterinary scenario where you're putting, you know, you know, you know, animals you're put to sleep in the freezer in bags and things like that, it feels a, you know, you get used to it, don't you?

That's, that's the norm. But when you're seeing that in a human context, it's like, it's pretty rough, pretty horrible. But, you know.

Like we were talking about before, that that's the thing that I, I feel the impact of within our professional working environment. Like I, I, I loved working in big busy hospitals, the camaraderie, the banter, the tea room conversations, the fact that you had 10 hands all helping each other in a busy environment. We've stripped, we've had to strip off the guy.

And it's lonely, you know, there's it's when I. Go into my hospitals now and I see 3 people sat in a tea room at other ends of a room that's marked out in tape. It just looks so miserable.

And it's tough, isn't it? It's a long days and it feels, you don't get that, that morale boost you used to get from, from that, you know, that human interaction. Yeah.

The anniversary, thing is, is actually very interesting cos I was. Recently on Facebook and, and the spivs conference from last year came up with Claire Balding speaking, and she of course made a comment about crofts and how she was encouraging them to, to up their ante on things like welfare. Now I know you're very involved in in rfts as well, you know, tell us how did you find.

Last year's experience, which was very much hit and miss, would it happen, wouldn't it happen, how did it develop and they made a very, you know, very close decision whether it went forward or not, so that must have been interesting to be involved from your, With your media hat on, so yeah, so yeah, so I, I mean I was asked to do crafts, it was probably, it was, it was kind of, under wraps, but it was from Christmas, before Christmas, you know, before, so it's Christmas 2019, and, and it's always a bit of a poison chalice, I would say, croft, because obviously as a veterinary profession. You know, we always look at the, the welfare practises within dog breeding and, you know, some of the rather questionable ones. So it was always, I thought, do you know what, this is, this is a, a, a media job that I'm probably gonna get quite a lot of stick for in the profession.

But I thought, do you know what, this is an opportunity for me to bring welfare issues to the table for me to say, right, OK, I can have a conversation with people if I'm sat around the table. I can't have a conversation with them if I'm sat in the. Another room wagging my finger, and we are waggy finger profession, I've got to say, you know, so, and obviously, Claire, was the main presenter, and she's obviously an advocate of animal welfare as well.

So some of the features we got in there were fantastic, you know, I, I got in features that, you know, you wouldn't normally see at Croft, and they were really open to it. And that was great. So I, I really enjoyed the experience, but yes, I remember the conversation the night, before the Wednesday night, and obviously the show was opening on Thursday.

And it was the, the day that a dog had tested positive for coronavirus in Hong Kong. Yeah. So you can just imagine, the panic and everything, and, you know, but there's people coming from all over the world and you look at it now and you think, oh my gosh, you know, that was a, but it was right at the start again, I think it was one of the last, last big events that that that that happened.

But they did, I mean, they were, they were, they were stopping people from, you know, having contact, there was socially distance going on, and they had hand sanitiser anywhere, everywhere, but I mean, there were still 100,000 people in, in the same, you know, airspace. So, I'm not sure, where we are now, whether it would go ahead and, and it has actually in fact been been postponed until at the moment we think July, but, I, I'm just not sure what shape or format it, it would have. But yeah, it was a, I mean it was a it was a great show.

But as I say, it was, it was almost felt like a past life because I, you know, fast forward a few weeks and and and I'm in ICU and you know, when I came out of ICU the whole world had changed. Everything had completely changed. And it was, yeah, and it's been very different ever since, hasn't it?

It has, but yeah, you know, our pets have been so important, whether we, you know, like it or not, we've had the, the pandemic puppies, the effect of, you know, more people taking on dogs as companions as well and I I know you're also a trustee of, of a charity that's very close to our heart at Webinarett, you know, the lovely Jade helped to set up Street Bet and . You know, for homeless people, you know, I know very well in Liverpool the number of dogs that homeless people will have, and they will often be their most faithful companion, where, you know, sometimes these are people who've been let down by the system, let down by other people, and yet dogs. I, I, I, I don't think I'll add cats in, but I'll definitely say dogs, dogs don't let you down, do they?

Yeah, I, I joined Street Vett 2019 as a trustee, and I, and I, I know Sam and Jade really well, and I actually went to to college with Jade, we were classmates. She was very much the top of the class and I very much wasn't, I'm gonna say. But but yeah, and I came on board and as a trustee, and really they asked me because I had experience in, you know, delivering a veterinary service on, on a large scale, and all the, the kind of the, the, the challenges that go with that and, and as you know, street bet there's definitely an appetite for for that service and I always.

I always think of of people that are experiencing homelessness. I always think they're almost like the overlooked and the forgotten, er you know, in society. Even within our our model at PDSA it's very difficult.

You know, cos, cos we, we operate on a means tested benefit system, and if people don't have a house, how do they, you know, how, how to get benefits register their address and things like that. So, and also there's a lot of people have a lot of kind of prejudice against er people on the streets as well. There is a lot of alcohol and drug addiction, that, that, that, that, you know, that that kind of is, is within that community.

But, but there's also, you know, there's a lot of people that have got mental health issues, there's a lot of people that are in those circumstances through no fault of their own. So again, it's a charity with a great purpose, and I'm hopefully giving them, you know, adding value as a trustee by, by giving them, my insight into operations and, and, and the, the risk is, is, obviously with a service like that is everybody. He's like, this is what we need.

So, so you try and expand it really, really quickly. So I have over the last year, tried to, to pull them in and say, no, let's do this in a controlled way and put some structure around it. But you know, the fact, the really interesting thing I find about Street bet is that you have, you know, and obviously when we could have the conference, face to face, I was talking to a lot of the volunteer vets and nurses.

And I was like, you know, asking them why do you volunteer for street vet, and because we want to feel like we're helping people and pets. And I'm like, and it always really interested me that, cos I'm like, but in your 9 to 5 where you're being a vet, 5 days a week, why do you not feel that you're helping people and pets? And it's just really interesting, this model of veterinary medicine that we've created, where a practitioner can go and work all day and see cases all day and, you know, fix pets and, you know, offer treatment and help clients with advice and stuff, and then come away from the end of the day and not feel like you've made a difference at work.

It's just really interesting and I and I think. That is why people love to go and give their skills to a charity like Street Bet cos they actually can see the absolute, you know, my time is translating as making somebody's life or a pet's life better. I think it's all about the business that they're working for.

Can they see is it purpose centred or profit centred? And you know, if they're not seeing a clear purpose for the actual place that they work for, then purpose is, is really important for most of us, isn't it? You know, profit, of course, is important because if you don't make profit, you can't run the business very long.

But the purpose and the values and adding value to clients should be the first thing, cos if you do that, you will probably have a successful enterprise, won't you? Yeah, I agree, but sometimes, you know, that purpose, you sometimes forget, you know, I mean I've had, you know, when I've worked. As a vet for a charity for many years now, and, and sometimes you, you forget what the higher purpose is.

You have to keep reminding yourself because actually we are heads down in the day to day most of the time, aren't we? So. Well, it's leadership, isn't it?

And as you were talking earlier about leadership, and I think somebody I recently spoke to said if you're going to go into leadership, study psychology, and it's very, very true, cos it is about people and it's about encouraging, you know, I see my job in, in my. Work as being an encourager for my, for my team, you know, cos most of them are cleverer than me, probably the majority, you know, so they're there really to, to actually make sure that the vision gets enacted, cos as one person you can't do that, can you? Absolutely, and this is probably the biggest challenge in the profession in 2021, I would say, for veterinary leaders, how do you engage, motivate, improve morale in your workforce at a point where we're all feeling it's Groundhog Day, and how do you align.

Your teams, you know, kind of, how do you align your team to your purpose? Because our purpose is, you know, very much changed, I would say, in the, in the last 12 months. Like, we, we always had, and the PA, we always had a culture of health and safety, you know, big, big kind of organisations do.

But to make it the focus. So actually, you know, this working safely is now gonna overtake all our, all our operating model. That's something that, that has completely, you know, thrown a curveball into how we would normally operate, operate the, the service.

So it is a challenge, and how do you improve how people feel about that when. They know it's the right thing to do, but nobody likes doing it. No, no, you know, nobody likes not being able to sit with your team and have a cup of tea.

You know, nobody likes putting, you know, a mask and a visor on all day, you know, wearing full PPE, you know, nobody likes it. So it, it's, how do we, how do we get engagement this year is the big challenge. It's, it's good, I think, you know, to finish off with light at the end of the tunnel with vaccinations and, and things happening.

So let's hope that it is a much better 2021 than perhaps 2020 was, particularly, you know, for your organisation as well and and. Yourself personally, Paul, so thanks so much for the chat, it's been really interesting. I'm so pleased that you are recovering and hopefully maybe the 28th of March, can be a celebratory day.

It's the day after my birthday, so maybe if we're allowed to do so, we should have a, we should have a virtual, pint together. Absolutely, well thanks for having me on, it's been great. Thanks so much Paul.

Take care, bye bye, bye bye.