As a vet care blog, what do you think we should do to best care for our individual vets? What interaction and enrichment is best for our vets? Unique mood cues to vets, signs they may need extra care? Can we have a basic vet care guide?

drferox:

A vet is a high performance animal bred and trained to perform in a high stress environment. For peak performance a careful regime of training, rest and optimal nutrition is essential. Unfortunately, most veterinarians are equipped with all the innate survival instincts of a newborn merino lamb.

Acquiring nutrition is a basic component of survival, yet many domesticated veterinarians will fail abysmally at this task without strict supervision. We are looking at a species capable of simply forgetting to eat. Despite their training and reasonable experience, it is common for veterinarians to subsist the entire day on caffeine only, and then wonder with puzzlement why they’re so damn hungry after 7pm. This habit, coupled with mental exhaustion at the end of the day, will lead many veterinarians to consume a poor quality, impulse driven diet.

Even in those veterinarians with marginally more survival instincts, if presented with food in the middle of the day, it is common to see them eat rapidly, not stopping to savor the food or even rest. This may leave them prone to indigestion, and especially cranky after an 8, 10 or 12 hours day.

So ensure you provide good nutrition for your veterinarian which can be consumed in multiple small snack-sized portions between tasks, or in one go without reheating in the rare event of a true lunch break. (ha!)

As many veterinarians have been inherently selected to be in ‘work mode’ all the time, it is imperative that you teach them to calm down and unwind. Teaching calm exercises is extremely useful for their longevity but requires diligent adherence to the ‘no talking about work’ rule. Ensure guests and visitors are also aware of this rule for consistent enforcement. Your veterinarian may resist, as some are driven to work 24/7, but it’s in their best interest.

Many vets will have done a stint of ‘on call’ work after hours, through which they have been trained to rapidly answer the phone and leap into work mode at any time of the day or night. This conditioning will persist for many years after the event with the vet startling into work mode instantly upon hearing the dreaded after hours ring. To prevent this, ensure all ringtones for phones in the house are switched to something other than the default to ensure they are a distinctly different sound to the dreaded after hours phone.

A highly trained performance animal needs rest spells and opportunities to engage in natural behavior. Unfortunately these natural, human behaviors (socializing, going out, engaging in media) may atrophy without care as the vet spends a higher and higher percentage of their time engaged in vet activities.

A particularly fatigued vet may need significant hand-holding as you attempt to re-integrate them into normal social behavior. Short, controlled gatherings with small numbers of people are an ideal starting point, gradually scaling up to more normal behavior after more positive interactions.

Vets rarely show symptoms of something being wrong at work until it’s already catastrophic. Watching their behaviour outside of work is a more sensitive indicator for how they’re really going because like many performance animals, vets will frequently ‘buck up’ when there’s work to do and sacrifice their own well being to do so. They will spend so much time and energy advocating for their patients that they neglect to advocate for themselves, which is where you can most help your vets.

Remind them that 60 hour weeks is both madness and unacceptable. That they shouldn’t be risking their health. That they need to eat properly, rest well, and be a complete being not just a vet 24/7 and enforce those rules for their mental health on those that interact with them too.

Because such a caring profession really does have trouble when it comes to caring for itself.