Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinarett welcoming you to another one of our episodes of Vet Chat. Very fortunate today to have Brianna Andrews on the line. Brianna is a recent graduate from Edinburgh University, but has also been a WikiVett ambassador.

Wikiett is a website that we acquired about 2 years ago. That's been a very successful website for student vets. I know Brianna, you were very interested and and used it a lot as a student, but perhaps tell us before we start speaking about Wiki vets, a little bit about your background and where you've come from.

So I started as a vet tech in the US actually, before I did. I did my first two undergraduate degrees at the University of California Davis, and I've come over here for vet school and as Anthony said, I went to the University of Edinburgh, and did my graduate entry start there and having finished in May of 2021, started a job with the PDSA here in Swansea, where I am currently. And you had a very interesting last year or two of your degree with the pandemic, how did that all go with having to work remotely and how did that affect your studies, the pandemic?

I think like everybody it was challenging. Certainly it, it made us highlight just how important it was, good communication and . And, and especially when the owners couldn't come into the consult rooms, couldn't come into the hospital, and student numbers were limited.

It really depended on us communicating well between us with the sort of skeleton staffs, working between the students and the staff, and also with the clients who couldn't be there to see what was going on and to make sure that they knew what the plan was and knew exactly what had happened with their animal and still felt that they had been a part of part of the whole process even if they weren't physically there. Now you were saying that you were actually a technician, first of all at UC Davis, which is obviously one of the top vet schools in America. Tell us a little bit about that part of the journey when you were growing up was the desire to be a vet, but you just.

Decided to do some tech work first, or how, how did that all come about? Yeah, so, I had always kind of wanted to be a vet. I'd always wanted to work with animals, but, in the states especially, you have to do an undergraduate degree before you go to veterinary school, which is a professional degree.

And that can get incredibly expensive and in part to get the experience, the hours of experience for veterinary school applications and in part to have money to live, I decided to after high school, do a veterinary technician's course in Southern California, which was a combined programme of classroom and on-site sort of internship learning. And then from that was able to work in the teaching hospital at UC Davis for a bit, some small animal practises in the area and did some zoo work as well, wildlife work. So it just helped me sort of support myself through school.

And, but I'm sure also having that. Both veterinary nurse, veterinary technician background, but also veterinary background must be incredibly helpful. Oh, absolutely.

I don't, I think I would have really struggled starting out in the PTSA in the pandemic with without that kind of a background, and we were on emergencies only, a lot of the pets were coming in, you know, collapsed or presenting with 6 different problems and trying to triage them, trying to work through which of the problems were interrelated, which were just independent issues, dealing with chronic on top of acute. It was, it was quite a lot, and I don't think that, I think I would have been. I, I, I would have struggled a lot more, I think if I hadn't had that background, and some of the experience to just do the triaging and just the manual skills of getting IVs placed quickly and being able to move things through things a bit more quickly and being a bit more used to talking to owners in very stressful times.

Yeah, I was gonna say the IVs getting dogs on fluids that have come in collapsed, you know, one of the first things you're gonna do is support them, so having those skills must have been really invaluable as you started in practise. Yes, and, and certainly the communication side of things, I think it can be terrifying the first few years of talking to owners and certainly I, I did the vet tech thing for almost a decade, and I remember having to build up those skills and it was nice that that was one area that I didn't have to focus so much on, and I can focus more on the medical and surgical aspects of being a vet, and, and have less focus on developing those soft skills when I started. Tell us a little bit about at university, the online space, how, how well the universities do you think have have coped with the pandemic from, from the sort of teaching online and and then perhaps how.

Sites like Wikibat have been a support for you. I think it was interesting doing the Wikiet ambassador programme because meeting with the other ambassadors from different vet schools, it became quickly apparent how differently every vet school, sought to tackle the pandemic. I know at Edinburgh, we were fortunate that we would have clinicians take time out of the day to do scheduled tutorials with us.

There was a component, especially in the final year of sort of self-study and self work. So we might be given sort of some chemotherapy, scenarios that we had to work out the dosing and the regime and things like that that we want to do and we would meet back up with one of the clinicians and discuss those findings later. But in that self-teaching, I felt that Wikiett was incredibly helpful for, Picking up on some of the information that bridged the gaps between what previous lectures had covered and what the clinicians now expected us to know when we weren't able to be in person and we weren't able to, to ask the clinicians sort of for step by step instructions, Wiki Bet really helped bridge that gap between the the lectures we had had and between the new hybrid learning system that they had to develop very quickly when the pandemic set in.

It's one of those, I suppose, big questions. The pandemic's obviously been a terrible time and a very challenging time, but also a time of great transformation, particularly digitally. And presumably you saw that at the vet school in that sort of year that you were there, the changes that happened in teaching and so on with digital, which obviously is something we've been doing, you know, for the last 12 years.

The universities are catching up. Do you think, obviously students now are, are much more digitally native than than I was 32 years ago when I qualified, when I think we didn't really even use the internet. In fact, that probably wasn't a thing.

And certainly using laptops to type our notes up, it was all still in big Liberarch folders and things, so, so times have changed over the. Certainly over the last two years, but definitely over that longer period as well. I think it's fantastic having more digital learning available.

I don't think that I, I personally wouldn't ever want to completely replace the in-person teaching, especially, as a final year on clinical rotations that I think I feel we all missed out on not being in person for that, but with the lecture content, the more that that moves online and the more that gets recorded, the more opportunities people have to go back and review that. And I know, you know, people on some of the Facebook groups in my student year and other student years will post periodically asking if anybody has the information from a lecture from before we graduated saying I can't remember this one thing. I remember it was in this lecture that this 11 clinician gave, and it was fantastic, and I'd love to just have that little reference if somebody else has access to it.

And I think having everything in a digital space just means for years afterwards we can go back and reflect on things that we remember really made an impact on us, but we can't just keep in the foreground of our mind at all times. I mean, it'd be really interesting to chat maybe about some of the changes in education, because obviously when I qualified in 1990, classes were really small, it was about 55 people. And now how many people were in your year when you qualified, Brianna?

I want to say about 160. So that's like 3 times, how, how does that affect learning in those, obviously lectures are the same, but in the smaller groups, I remember when I was doing my dissections and so on for anatomy, there was myself and another chap who would you know, be able to do the dissections together. How, how have you been coping with those sort of things when you were doing anatomy, you know, a number of years ago?

We did, still did small group learnings and I didn't actually feel like the class size was an impediment then. I think in part because the hospital, especially at Edinburgh, has grown to support that. There are a number of interns, there's a number of number of specialist interns, there's a number of clinicians and then senior clinicians.

So there was always sort of enough staff as long as it was planned. Well enough in advance, I suppose, that they would be able to still be small group sizes and have different tutors floating around around the room to be able to answer different levels of questions. So obviously, some of the things you want to direct the clinician, but some of the things if it's an anatomy lab, it might be something that, a specialist intern, like a surgical intern or something could help you with.

So I know, our final year, one of the best things that came out of it, I think, was that we had, cadaver surgical practise which hadn't been run before because we weren't getting that on-site teaching as much with the pandemic. And we had groups of four, that would work on the same dog and we did a whole series of things with them starting from a nucleations and dentals and then using the same cadavers for soft tissue surgery day and then an orthopaedic surgery day. So I felt like we really got good value out of the learning capacity of each animal, and 4 was a small enough number that all of us got to try everything throughout the course of an 8 hour day, and so it's kind of the best of both worlds and, and those sorts of practicals we would have a mix of interns and clinicians floating about to help with anything.

One of the things that I investigated probably 4 or 5 years ago now was the whole sort of mixed reality, use of mixed reality to teach anatomy as well, with hollow vets, so if people are listening, if you want to go to YouTube, you'll see the . The virtual German Shepherd dog, and then we also did, with worked with Microsoft for a week on their HoloLens to develop a, a cow udder, a virtual cow udder for the students at Harper Adams. Do you see some of those things coming?

Did you see any of that at the university or is that still sometime in the future, do you think? We had access to virtual limbs for horses and, cattle, I think especially for horses to go through the tendons and different things that would happen when you lost function of, of each one. I know I, I attended a farm animal congress at Bristol, a few years ago, and they had a virtual simulator for A grabbed cow, so you could palpate and feel different ages of gestation in sort of a mechanical simulator, with the A fake ultrasound machine attached to it.

So as you moved around, it would, it would show you different things and it would, the machine would move to make it feel like it was different levels of gestation, you could get a better feel for that. I thought that was a really cool thing that I hope that they can bring out to more schools because it's certainly difficult to get all the students through doing that in a live cow and maybe get them all of the experience that they would want, and keeping in mind the the fairness of that on the animals themselves who are being palpated and You know, whether or not you have enough of a stock to allow all of the students to have that opportunity. I think that was Sarah Bailey's haptic cow, wasn't it, which has been amazing.

I, I, I have to tell a tale, Brianna, when I was a student, we had a farm across the way from Lee Hurst, and cows would be lined up for us to, to do rectals on for the pregnancy diagnosis. And what they suggested to make it easier for the cows was that as one person was sliding their hand out, the other person would slide their hand in and it wouldn't be so painful on on the the rectum of the cow. I am very tall, about 6'6, and, I was with my parturition gown, taking my hand out, where, whereas, my fellow student was quite small, and as she put her hand in, the cow, to put it politely, farted.

And she was covered in the face with faeces. I don't think she saw the funny side of it. Of course I was hit in the chest, so I was OK, but unfortunately she got it right in the face, which was, unfortunate but funny.

I'm sure one of the highlights of her vet school's journey. Whereas, as you say, you just don't have that sort of situation with a haptic cow anyway, so these are some of the advantages. Where do you see the practises developing now through the pandemic?

Do you think that there are things that we've learned? That will stick, and do you think there are things that we did because we had to that will actually fade away or or be stopped fairly quickly? What are your thoughts on that?

I don't know how new this technology is, but certainly the movement towards getting people to access information online at home is something that the PDSA has really pushed, and there's a texting feature in our computer software that allows us to send them links to the PDSA's own information that has been developed on common conditions, you know, with videos online of how to properly clean your dog's ears at home. How to manage a diabetic dog and here's what to expect and things like that. And it's certainly been a huge help during the pandemic, especially when we weren't having owners in or we were having them in the distance and sometimes there's hearing difficulties, especially with masks and lexiclas and everything going on, to be able to say, I will send you this information, and to know that I wouldn't have to spend sort of 15 minutes typing all of that up, that there was a really good resource that I could give them.

The the information that I needed to as a vet and then give them the rest of the sort of husbandry and home care information that was already pre-developed. I think reliance on technology like that, I know we're moving away from telecoms a bit now and what we can and what we can. And I think telecoms had a really important role, especially for more isolated places, maybe less so in the UK, but, certainly in places like the US where I know some of the practitioners would be trying to cover 3 hour radiuses, from their practise and, and the telecoms gave them the opportunity to give more care to animals that developing these kinds of Written resources that we can just send out to them, can really improve the health and welfare of animals without having to get them in because they're not always going to be, it's not always going to be possible for the owners to do that, and it's not always going to be feasible for the animal to go through the stress of coming in, every week for a long term condition, especially like something like diabetes.

So I hope that we continue to develop ways to help owners help themselves through technology. And I think the other thing that's really come from the pandemic that's been a good thing has been setting boundaries with owners. I think that, You know, we are in a customer service industry to some extent, and the pandemic having the legislation support us wearing masks and having distancing and having things in place where we could tell owners this is how it's going to run, and I'm sorry if you don't like that, but this is how it has to be.

I think has given us a bit more traction as a profession to be able to set boundaries with with clients who aren't. Necessarily as respectful of the way that a vet clinic operates, and I hope that that's something that we can keep moving forward as a profession on and, standing up for each other and, and reinforcing practise standards and safety standards, that I think clients have had to become more receptive to because of all the healthcare concerns currently with the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I stopped practising about 6 years ago, to obviously concentrate on webinar best.

But thoroughly enjoyed my time as a practitioner, it's one of the best jobs in the world. How are you finding your first year in practise, are you enjoying it? Definitely enjoying it, definitely run off my feet.

This is part of the problem at the moment with the pandemic, less vets, more animals, how do you make sure that you take time to look after yourself? The PDSA is good about encouraging a one hour lunch break, which I think is just really a necessary time to decompress during the day, not only just to get food, but also just to shut off from having to think about cases and things like that. And I think the people that I work with are really good about supporting each other.

There's no one on the staff that I couldn't come to and say, I've got this animal, I need somebody to take a second look at it. And it doesn't matter how busy we are, we all understand that all of us need second opinions sometimes, not just me as a new grad, and they're very happy to include that into their day, even when it's already a very busy one, and I think we just have to keep showing up for each other like that, and putting the mindset that we have to work as a team above all else and, and make sure to step in and help even if it's a bit of a hindrance to our own work. Hm.

That's really powerful, I think that the idea of team, . I was speaking to somebody last week, quite a famous marketer called Seth Godin, he was talking about nobody gets burnt out having lunch, you have lunch every day, you know, you love, you enjoy that lunch. Similarly, we, we all love being vets, but somehow we're, we're being burnt out by it, and I think having that time off, having that support of colleagues.

Is such an important part, isn't it? Yeah, the vet community is, is such a strong one, and I think the profession in general, you can't do anything by yourself. I mean, half the patients I see are You know, almost as big as I am, and I always need a second pair of hands, whether that's, you know, another vet, to help me work up a case or whether that's a VCA or a nurse to help hold an and restrain an animal, and we wouldn't be able to get through a single day without relying on each other, without close physical and emotional contact with one another, going through difficult scenarios, going through difficult euthanasias and And I think that we just have to keep that at the forefront and maybe turn the profession towards focusing on that to be relations rather than be to client relations a bit more because I think we get so worried about, you know, Making sure the client is happy and and on the same page as us and everything and not that client communication isn't crucially important, but that to that communication is also, and I think that that kind of gets lost in the message sometimes.

Brianna, it's been great speaking to you, thank you for taking time out of your lunch hour, I hope you still get time for some, for some lunch, to speak to us and er really enjoyed hearing how this first year has gone for you. Thanks so much, Anthony. I hope you guys have a great day.

Cheers.