Hello. It's Anthony Chadwick from the Webinar vet welcoming you to another episode of that chat, the U K's Number one Veterinary podcast. And I must admit, it's always a joy to do these podcasts because it's often an opportunity just to speak to old friends.
And, we all have busy lives, and I think sometimes we don't prioritise our relationships enough. So it's great to be able to speak to Russell, who's me and him Go back a few years now, and, it was really lovely rustling. I think it was about November time to come down and gate, crash your party and bring loud guitars and things and play a bit of music for you before you.
Well, for your retirement or selling of the practise or whatever it was leaving the practise that you've been in down in, in Newport for 2030 years, hadn't you? And and moving on to pastures new. But you didn't just move over to Swansea or Cardiff, did you?
You you've been a bit more exotic than that. Exactly. Well, thank you very much for inviting me on the podcast, Anthony.
And it's great to be here Yes. So And thank you for the wonderful music that you brought with you when you came to my leaving party or departure from the practise that I'd been at for 27 years. Which I'd started from scratch, built it up and eventually sold to a corporate and then stayed on part time as a consultant for six years.
And then finally, had the opportunity really to leave and come to where I am today, which is I'm in practise in Mount Pleasant Veterinary Group, which is a Mars practise in Singapore. And Singapore is a beautiful country. You have left a gorgeous place because, of course you were living in Newport, or I think you were you classed as clearly on where you lived.
Yeah, I was living in Newport, which is a nice part of Southeast Wales, and and obviously, Wales is a beautiful part of the UK. And, I've come to another, very different but beautiful place which is in Southeast Asia, which is Singapore. And really, I've come for as much as anything.
The change, the adventure and the new challenge. Yeah, I think you when you spend a long place, A long time in a place You've obviously love that place. We used to enjoy coming down for the spivs VP MA VMG conference, which was obviously there.
And a number of occasions. We had some nice meals, didn't we? At the, at the curly on pub there.
What was it called? Yeah, and of course, famous as a as a Roman legions base, wasn't it? It was one of the major bases in the whole of of Britain for the Romans in the first few centuries.
AD. Absolutely. It's a great place.
Yeah, well, I, I enjoyed my time there. The people were very good to me. The clients were very good to me.
I had a great team to work with, and, you know, it was wonderful. But you get to a stage where sometimes you just need a new challenge. And probably, at my kind of stage of my career, I'm not going to get too many opportunities.
So I grabbed this one with both hands and came over here to see what I could do in Asia. It's not my first time in Asia because back in the nineties, I was in Hong Kong for four years and I had a great time there challenging, very sort of, it was developmental for my career. It was a real sort of pivotal time then, and hopefully being here in Singapore back in Asia again allows me to perhaps do some good and to learn more about you know, what happens in veterinary in other parts of the world.
Hm. I think those first few years are so pivotal. They do make you the vets and the person that you become and been talking about that a little bit on on different podcasts.
It's we, we we always have a problem with retention. And I think often it's that first five years, isn't it? If you can get through those first five years, if you accept that, that's gonna be tough.
You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna fail a lot. You'll have some successes along the way.
But if you can get through that and you get to 10 years, you often look back and say it would have been very easy to leave at five. But I'm so glad I didn't because it's one of the best jobs in the world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that, Antony.
It really is. And the veterinary profession has been so good to me. It's allowed me to travel.
It's allowed me to develop my interests in the various things that I've done. Surgery orthopaedics, orthopaedic engineering, stem cells, osteoarthritis. You name it, you can go off on a tangent, and as long as you stay, you know, reasonably, close to you know, your roots and your veterinary, career, you don't necessarily have to stay in your lane.
And I've never been one for actually staying in my lane. I've always flitted about a bit and picked what I like, from here or from there, and brought it back into my sort of skill set. So I'm very pleased to have had that flexibility.
Yeah, I think looking outside the profession is important because often the future is actually the present. It's just in another sector, and I talk a lot about we do univer You know, we do school. G CS es a levels.
It's curriculum based. We do university. It's curriculum based other other person's curriculum.
Once you qualify, you set your own curriculum, don't you? And whether you want to stay in clinical practise or you become a, you know somebody who works for a pharmaceutical company or a feed company or whether you want to be a large animal vet or a small animal vet or whether you wanna do orthopaedics, which is obviously, for people who like to who, when they were younger, like to do E models. Or you do the easy stuff, like dermatology, where you don't have to be that clever.
It's all on the surface, and it's very easy because you can see it all. You know, we all have our skills and our, our strengths and our weaknesses, don't we, Russell? Yeah, we certainly do.
I'm really keen to know a little bit about the situation in in Singapore because, obviously, it's a long way away from where we are culturally different. What's the attitude in Singapore to people's pets? Do you have all the same medicines that we have in in the UK?
You know, and how how do people perceive for things like, you know, orthopaedic operations and what's maybe the situation with insurance so there's a few ones for you to get your teeth into. So, fundamentally, wherever you go, veterinary is similar, but it's not identical. So Singapore, has its own, differences and its own challenges.
The clients, the ones that I've met or the ones that I've dealt with are really, really good and caring and willing to spend a lot of money on their pets and willing to do a lot of care for their pets. The longevity of the human population in Singapore is one of the highest in the world, and it appears to be the same for the pets. So in terms of the typical sort of case that you may have compared to, say, the UK, they tend to be older, and they tend to have more in the way of comorbidities.
So it's not unusual for me to be presented with an orthopaedic case, and, in the UK. That would be an orthopaedic case where you maybe fix a cru or do a patella lex or a fracture or whatever. A lot of the time here, you've got to think about what else has the animal got?
Because they're more elderly patients. They've probably got renal impairment. They may have cardiac problems.
Cancer? Who knows what. So it's challenging from the point of view of, you've got to think a bit widely, as to look at the whole animal a lot more than you would as, say, an orthopaedic surgeon in the UK where you kind of just you can almost just deal with a limb or deal with a joint problem, whereas here it's a it's a different kettle of fish.
Honestly, because you've got all of those co comorbidities probably going on. Like I said, the clients are great and they are willing to spend money. Insurance hasn't really penetrated much, so I've got the odd client who's insured, but it's not really the norm, but the clients are willing to spend.
One interesting phenomenon is, you do tend to have these things called community cats. So a cat, rather than having an owner, a cat, might be owned by a community, so you'll have an animal in. And I've had a couple where we've done quite extensive surgery on these community cats, which is funded by the collective of the community rather than an individual.
So it's It's really quite fascinating but difficult to get your head around that you're actually dealing with the community's cat rather than an owner's cat. But it is interesting. I think it's different.
Asian people often think much more collectively and in in a societal sense, whereas we think very much individualistically I have to pick you up. Russell, if you don't mind. Since when did you think you ever owned a cat?
A cat owns owns you? You are on a cat. You know, we had a cat who adopted us during the pandemic.
I am his butler, and my wife is his chief maid. So yeah, they they just wheedle their way into your life and then make demands of you. They certainly do.
But let's put it in this way. Then. If you're a community cat, then you'll have multiple butlers.
Yes, which is even better, isn't it? So even even the sort of Asian cats are sensible. They they understand community because cats in the UK just want to live on their own.
But here they they have, or in Singapore they'll have multiple families or, as you say so, another another thing about, the Singapore people and the Singapore population is that, end of life care tends to be a lot longer than it would be in Europe. In other words, the humane euthanasia side is much further down the road. So that means that you do do a lot of palliative care.
A lot of hospice type care, which is is also different. And it's something that if you, if you come to Singapore to work, or maybe it's the same in other Asian countries. You do have to adapt your approach that adaptability is important, isn't it?
Because it's very easy to be an arrogant northern European or American coming to Africa or Asia and telling people this is how you should do things and presumably, you know, having been in Singapore for six months, it's It's really good sometimes just to watch and view, rather than pontificate about how this is wrong or that is wrong. Yeah, absolutely. So, I've come here as much to learn as I have to, you know, teach and help other vets and and the and the practise that I'm in.
So, you know, I come from a point that first I will, as you say, Keep my mouth shut, keep my eyes and ears open and see what's going on. See what my colleagues are up to? Because they're probably doing things for a good reason, and there may be sound cultural reasons why they do what they do, and it may be completely alien to somebody from the UK.
On the other hand, if you're a patient and you know you just observe, you may be able to, unpick the reasons for the procedure or the approach to the client or the approach to the the medical or the surgical case. And that way I think you'll get on better than if you go in there all guns blazing. As you've said, you're and especially in Asia, you're probably going to upset your colleagues, and it's not going to be pretty.
So I think being patient and being cautious, is something that I had to learn when I first went to Asia last time. And it's something that I still have to sort of keep in mind on the subject of medicines. We have a different range of medicines here, and If you go overseas to work, you will find yourself with a different range of medicines from what you're used to.
And in Singapore, the licencing of veterinary medicines, isn't particularly well developed, Which means that a lot of the time we're using off label, human products a lot of the time, we're using imported products. So, you do have to be very careful about dose rates. You do have to be very careful about what you're doing.
And like I've said, there is so much in the way of, elderly patients with comorbidities going on that a lot of the time you can fall foul of, the side effects. For example, if you're using nonsteroidals a lot of the time, you will have an animal who's got compro compromised organ function. So you want to make sure that you know you're not making that worse.
Hm. Obviously you're in the practise at Mount Pleasant and doing referral type cases, but very much I think, like me, you had your own practise and did, referrals in orthopaedics as I did in dermatology. So having that first opinion background, I think is is really good.
There's a an advantage, obviously, with diplomats and and university types. But sometimes coming from a very practical basis, you've got a very practical attitude, and you're probably more used to dealing with, you know, large numbers of clients and things. Do you think that's put you in a position where there's maybe some of that humility comes through as well?
I hope so. I hope so. I think everything that I've done in my life from being, an assistant vet starting out to being, you know, climbing up to being a referral vet to being a practise principal, to then being a consultant vet and then coming back to being a full time referral vet in a different continent.
All of those things are grist to the mill. So I think you take a little bit of stuff from everywhere. A little bit of knowledge, a little bit of skill, a little bit of experience.
You make mistakes along the way, you learn from them and you take it with you. So with any luck, you know when you get to our sort of stage of our career, we do have a lot of experience, which will stand us in good stead for, you know, approaching cases, approaching clients, helping our colleagues, being helped by colleagues or maybe even asking for help. You know, a lot of the time as vets, we don't ask for help whether it be to do with our clinical cases, whether it be to do with anything around, you know, our career or our lives.
We are very bad at asking for help. So I've learned as I've gone that you know, the first thing I do probably in a new situation, is I ask people I say, Will you be so kind as to help me? Because I don't understand what's going on here.
Maybe I don't understand what people have said because the language barrier. I don't understand why things are being done this way. And if you befriend people and say, would you please help me?
You know, you find that things go much better than if you are putting up a front and pretend you know everything, even though you don't and, you know, trying to bluff or fake it till you make it. I take the opposite approach that I ask for help and I say I don't know all the answers. Can you help me?
And that's kind of my approach, I think particularly when you start a new job. It's always stressful at whatever age and then encountering different drugs. You know, I did some clinics about a year ago and it was very much right.
Get the nurse in the room. Right. OK, this is a first vaccination.
OK, Which two bottles do you mix up? You know, even straightforward things like that. I don't know where the antibiotics are kept.
Can you help me with that? It always is stuff at the beginning that takes time. But obviously after a month, two months, It's the sort of thing that you start to get into.
And the job does become easier, doesn't it? It certainly does. Are you currently looking for a new role?
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You've done some really nice webinars for us. And I know you've you're very involved with, I think it's veterinary osteoarthritis alliance. Not everybody will know what that is.
Why was that formed? What are you trying to accomplish with this, particular, alliance? Oh, I'm glad you've asked that.
So, Antony, veterinary Osteoarthritis Alliance is a nonprofit organisation. And in a nutshell, we are there to promote best practise in osteoarthritis care. Osteoarthritis is one of the biggest causes of chronic pain and morbidity in our canine and feline population.
And up until maybe 10 years, possibly five years ago, it was very, very underserved in terms of the veterinary care that we were able to provide. Now it's become a thing. People know that there is such a thing as a multimodal approach to osteoarthritis.
So our job with my colleagues at the VO a is to, as I've said, encourage, educate and connect people who are interested in osteoarthritis. So if you're a veterinary surgeon, who is interested in O a and you should be because there's so much of it about. If you're a veterinary nurse and you want to know more or upskill yourself in O A, you can join.
If you're a vet, physio, you can connect with all those others. We've got professors, we've got scientists. We've got the whole range of the multidisciplinary team that you might need to go and do an excellent job of your osteoarthritis care.
So one of the things that I run, like you, Anthony, is I have a podcast, which is the VO a podcast. Obviously, we don't have your listenership yet. But, we're growing.
And, so I could plug the VO a podcast as a way an easy way that people can learn more from the experts because, like you, I have guests on. And the the lucky thing about being a podcaster is you get to find the experts, and usually they'll say yes to appearing on your show, and then you can pick their brains. You can ask them all the questions that you want to ask, and get the information that you need, and and that tends to be what everybody else wants.
So it makes for an interesting and informative thing with with loads of take homes. So what I like to do is is make a make an episode that is really useful to people, not high science, or you know too much into the detail. We do sometimes get into the weeds a bit, but mostly it's practical advice and helpful stuff.
So that's the veterinary osteoarthritis alliance. We have a conference coming up later this month. The VO a con, un.
Unfortunately, I won't be there cos I'm in Singapore, but, anybody who's got any interest in osteoarthritis, you can come along to that and, join our ever growing numbers. I can remember, remedy coming out for the first time, which was a Pfizer product, carp profen. And this was where, you know, people were saying things like, Oh, well, you've just done a bitch, baby.
But you don't want them to move around. So therefore, don't give them any pain relief. So things have moved on so much in that sort of 1520 years.
Just we can do so much for pets in operative periods, obviously. You know, after surgery, orthopaedic surgery, but then post surgery or just because of normal wear and tear. I remember we did our first ever series on feline, medicine with hills in 2010 when we just started Webinar vet.
And I remember Duncan Laselle saying, What is the most common, disease in in cats? And, you know, obviously the dermatologist thinks it's dermatology. Dentist thinks it's dentistry, but actually it is osteoarthritis because by a certain age, pretty much all cats in the in the population will have, will have osteoarthritis, won't they?
And, talking about buddy before this cat that adopted us during the pandemic at 14 wanted a retirement home, quiet a house. We knew where he came from. They were getting less interested.
He didn't want the three dogs, two cats, kids falling on him all the time. So he wanted to find a little retirement home. And at 14 and even at 18, he's still jumping on the window ledge.
But, we've had him on the senia to help, you know, from that side. And then, unfortunately, he just seemed to be not able to get up to the, window ledge anymore. I think he'd fallen off and hurt himself.
But back on, meloxicam. And, he's managing at 18 this month to, to get onto the window ledge. So if I can do the same at 100 I'll be quite pleased If I If I can do that now, jump from the floor and jump on the window ledge and do it with that precision, I'll be pretty happy with myself.
Yeah, absolutely. So haven't things changed in the last period of time in osteoarthritis? It's It's a really exciting field to be in moving to Asia.
I found that there is a lot to do with osteoarthritis because whereas in the UK we have, obviously we have the VO A and, a couple of other organisations that are focusing on osteoarthritis. We don't have the same in Asia. So, for me, there's plenty of, you know, territory.
Yeah, there's plenty of challenge for me, to get my teeth into and hopefully help the pet population. You know, in this part of the world. Yeah.
I mean, obviously, very fortunate. You know, I qualified from Liverpool University, one of the best universities in the world. Set up webinar that because once you, digitalize education, you democratise it so it allows education to be spread to other countries where perhaps the standard isn't so high.
So but moving in the right direction. And of course, if we're helping animals or we're helping vets in other parts of the world and that helps animals, then animal welfare is going to improve and analgesia and excellence in analgesia is is so important. So thanks for all the work you're doing on that Perhaps a bit more of a an existential threat.
And we talk about it a lot, and I'd love to get your perspective on it. Is the use and abuse of antibiotics in in, you know, all over the world? I think we have a reasonable reputation in the UK.
What's the situation like in in Singapore? And and maybe, you know, Asia. If you've got any perspective on that, Singapore is not so different from the UK in terms of antibiotic stewardship.
And, I'm lucky enough to be the the steward in my particular practise, so that allows me to see what's going on. We have a traffic light system where we have three tiers of antibiotics, the ones of so called low importance than the medium importance and then the very important ones. So in order to be able to prescribe the very important antibiotics, which are things like en reflux in, the vet in the practise has to have met certain criteria.
So they have to have done a culture and sensitivity. They have to prove in that culture and sensitivity that the en fluoxetin, for example, is the drug of choice. And nothing else in the lower tiers will do the job, and then they have to come to me for permission.
So I'm kind of the guardian of the antibiotic, and I oversee the use of it. So it's that that's pretty good and pretty stringent, I think, in other countries in Asia, I can't vouch for that. And as you know, the availability over the counter of antibiotics in in a lot of countries is there, which means that we globally we have a big challenge.
But I think what we have to do first, as we are doing in the UK and we're doing in Singapore is to put our own house in order before we can go overseas and say, Well, you know, you guys are doing it wrong, So I think at the moment we're at the stage where we're enforcing or encouraging or educating around ST of antibiotics, in Singapore. And, it seems to be, very well accepted by the vets. So I think that is a big step forward towards the sort of the global campaign of trying to make sure that we don't continue to make the mistakes that we've made around antibiotic misuse.
If the are the antibiotics you're using in Singapore, all licenced for animals or are they human and generic? They're they're a mixture of both really? And so we don't really have, like we have in the UK.
We don't really have a V MD. We don't really have drugs that are licenced as opposed to drugs that aren't licenced. They're all pretty much unlicensed.
So what we're really doing in Singapore is, we are kind of replicating the situation in other developed countries. But we may not always be able to get the brand or the the actual you know, the actual medicine that that we wanted so we'll use a human equivalent very often. So it's like what we do with a cascade in the UK where you're using things off label.
So that is something that hopefully, is on the cards for for improvement. And as time goes on, things are getting tightened up with the authorities here, and I think that's going to be a good thing. It sounds like it's a really good system, I suppose.
I know. One of the other problems is counterfeits, which, if you see a tablet and it looks like it potentiated amoxicillin tablets and it's packaged as a potentiated amoxicillin tablets is not unreasonable to expect it to be a potentiated amoxicillin tablet. But I think certainly in some countries that's not Is it precisely precisely so our neighbouring countries, there may be different challenges there.
I'm perfectly aware of that. Well, again, you know, it's such an important area, and I think I know Mars. You know are particularly interested in it as a extra, and I think it's still on the site, but Charlie can leave a a link of it.
If it is they they did last year at the virtual Congress at a webinar on pharmaceutical stewardship Cos of course, it's a bigger area cos antibiotics can accumulate in the environment, but so can you know some of the ectoparasite asides and so on. So it's It's definitely an area that we need to look at, isn't it? Exactly exactly.
But, Russell, you're you're settling in. Lynn and yourself are found a nice place to stay. You haven't seen the, the otters yet, though, have you?
Absolutely. So a lot of people, including myself, might be surprised that the wildlife in Singapore we've got over a dozen national parks and they are absolutely full of all sorts of creatures. Snakes, crocodiles, pangolins, you name it.
OK, it's all here. Even though we're a kind of a city state. So So that's incredible.
So, Singapore is a great place. It's a very yeah. It's called a city in nature.
It really is, and a tropical climate so very hot and humid and very wet. So it's It's like being in the same climate as you'd have in a rain forest. So from that point of view, that kind of wouldn't suit everybody, but it definitely suits me because it's warm all the time and it's, you know, it's really exciting.
So you know, I would encourage anybody that, you know, if they haven't thought about coming to Asia to work. It's It's a great you've got it wouldn't suit everybody. You've got to have a kind of adventurous spirit.
And fortunately for me, I'm at the stage of my life where my Children have grown up. My nest is empty. So it's given me the opportunity to come back to Asia and have that final fling, that final adventure and do it somewhere that I've always wanted to go, and I've always wanted to live.
Plus, it's very, very close to lots of other wonderful countries. I just came back from Vietnam today before I before I came on this podcast. And that was really, really something as well.
But I also remember, you know, going back to Newport. There's lots of animals in, in in Wales as well, but we did unfortunately have to deal with, a wildlife emergency. One time when we were both in Newport, I was at the, spivs VMG conference.
We decided to go down to do the park run. And, unfortunately, we found a a poorly, I think it was a lesser black back, wasn't it? I?
I believe so. Yeah. Absolutely.
And, unfortunately, I had to take my t-shirt off to hold on to this bird. And I think the people of Newport are still traumatised after that event, aren't they? Yes.
Yeah, I. I remember we went into, our practise. So there was this, very, very tall, half naked person.
And, I introduced you as well. You've heard of the webinar that? Well, here he is.
I don't think anybody believed me, actually. But the poor old, seagull, unfortunately, didn't live to fight another day. But at least we were able to, put him put him out of his misery.
Weren't we precisely, Russell, I am hoping at some point before you come back to, to Wales that I might get out to see you, but, I'm so pleased that you're enjoying yourself and Lynne send my best wishes to her. And of course, thank you for all the great work you're doing. And thank you so much.
For coming on on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Antony. And thank you for the invitation.
Cheers. Take care. Thanks, Russell.
Thanks everyone for listening. This has been vet chat, the number one UK veterinary podcast and, looking forward to seeing you on a podcast or a webinar very soon. Take care.
Have a great day. Bye. Bye.
