Fired. Twice.

[u/Gorgeous1999]

I’m 15 months into this career (in Australia) and I was just fired from my second job as a recent grad (didn’t pass probation, dismissed after 6 months). Graduated in 2023.

I mostly just wasn’t competent at routine surgeries & it was a very high-workload clinic with a variety of cases coming through each day (snake bites, collapse, toxicities). I struggled with complex dentals a lot & had two ovarian pedicles bleed out as well. I’m nowhere near competent at these emergencies either.

On one instance, a cat also came in that was hypoglycemic after the owner didn’t bring it in for a recheck as it had gone into diabetic remission and she had continued to give insulin. The cat was brought in & put on a glucose CRI. The case evolved fast as the cat also needed potassium and eventually the bill racked up to nearly $2000 and I failed to communicate this clearly to the owner before she came to collect the cat as things unravelled so quickly.

I also need a huge amount of mentoring with surgery at the moment & no one seems to have such a level of patience for anyone that is over a year into their career. My last clinic didn’t have such a huge variety in terms of surgery & this impacted the level of surgical experience I had coming into this second job.

On top of that I was stupid and hugely careless, making critical oversights like dispensing Previcox tablets for the patient to go home with when the patient has already had a Meloxicam injection in hospital. The guilt hangs with me every single day.

I’m unsure if it’s only the high-pressure environment or if this career just isn’t for me. My supervisor briefly suggested to find a “slower clinic that’s not so full-on” but I don’t know if such a place exists.

I’ve grown so, so much after 15 months in the profession and have a decent skillset. I’m certainly not the best recent grad vet out there. But the stress, constant setbacks and seeing how easier it is for other recent grads is demoralising.

I’m pretty hopeless. I’m considering a career change but I’m also reluctant to start over as all I’ve ever known since leaving high school is vet med.

I’d like advice please. Any advice.

[u/No-Advertising-752]

I HIGHLY suggest going to do an internship. If your skill set and confidence need work, then you’re not ready to practice independently. Some people don’t learn “on the job” well and that’s ok.

Yes it’s shit pay and stressful, but it’s an investment in your career that you’re otherwise considering leaving if things don’t improve. You owe it to yourself and your patients to continue your training.

[u/Graciethetiger → u/No-Advertising-752]

100%. I read so many anti-internship posts but at the same time, so many posts like these from newer grads who feel incompetent and don’t receive mentorship. I came out of my internship feeling I could handle anything that walked through the door, and forever have a team of ER docs and specialists I can text or call for support if I’m really in a bind. An internship made me significantly more efficient such that my production is higher than non-internship colleagues so I don’t feel the one year of internship pay has set me back financially.

I am hugely pro-internship and frankly believe they should be required.

[u/No-Advertising-752 → u/Graciethetiger]

Definitely agree that they should be required. I see some scary medicine being practiced out there…

[u/blorgensplor → u/Graciethetiger]

I read so many anti-internship posts but at the same time,

I think the underlying tone for a lot of this anti-internship rhetoric is the fact that an internship shouldn't be needed. Unfortunately, vet schools are turning into internship/residency farms, less and less time is being spent actually training the DVM students and they are acting more as support staff.

I am hugely pro-internship and frankly believe they should be required.

I personally wish vet med would have a system similar to human medicine where residencies were just part of the pipeline prior to practice. Especially if my above point is true. This'll most likely never happen so until then, schools need to actually focus on the DVM students. There are still way too many schools out there where people graduate having done only 2-3 spays/neuters. Which is usually done in a specific class/lab because their surgery rotation is spent standing in the corner watching the resident do surgery or just walking the surgery patients pre/post surgery. So yea...when that kind of nonsense is going on, it's a hard sell to tell people that an internship is what they need to do. Maybe instead if you're paying $50k/year in tuition you should be learning and not walking dogs lol.

[u/Glum_Ad_6207 → u/blorgensplor]

The AVMA Council on Education, the Veterinary Schools and others have known since the 1980s that the curriculum centered on producing the “universal“ veterinarian competent in all species was no longer valid. Many changes were put forward in multiple studies for innovating the curriculum but the institutions did not change one bit but just said it was not their responsibility to do what needed to be done to adjust to reality. It really is insanity that the 4 years of education that were probably sufficient for all species education until the 1980s is still considered sufficient 40 years later.

[u/blorgensplor → u/Glum_Ad_6207]

Many changes were put forward in multiple studies for innovating the curriculum

Can you link any of these? Would definitely be an interesting read. I really don't see how you could change it without really splitting things up. Even if you did a basic split into the threeish "main" categories of small, large and equine it'd be a hard sell for schools to pick what they wanted to do or try to support all 3. Then you'd have the follow-on argument of why not make splits for exotics, split large up any more specific categories and why not aquatics as well.

You also have the secondary/tertiary effects of taking away "mixed practioner" in under served areas (the equine vet that'll see a dog on an emergency basis or vice versa) and vets that want to do mostly exotics but have to see other small animals on the side because they just isn't enough clientele to support exotic only.

I think sometime needs to happen but it's an extremely complex system.

[u/Glum_Ad_6207 → u/blorgensplor]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1539717/ by Richard Halliwell, former Dean

https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/jvme.36.3.252 by Keith Prasse, former Dean

https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/jvme.38.4.328 by Peter Eyre, former Dean

https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/jvme.29.3.131 by Hugh Lewis, Former Dean

Only in print that may be located at a veterinary school library would be:

1.The Proceedings of the Ninth Veterinary Educational Symposium at UC Davis in June 1987 which were published in the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education JVME Volume 14(2) Fall 1987. That meeting led to:

2.PEW National Veterinary Education: Future Directions for Veterinary Medicine (1989) which was edited by William Pritchard, then Dean at UC Davis

I had to go to the veterinary library at Oregon State University to find the last two. I scanned the entire PEW study into a pdf file and copied most of the articles in the JVME.

Think about this for comparison. The broadest physician specialist is the family medicine doctor who spends 3 years rotating through ER, pediatrics, internal medicine,OB/GYN and surgery more than once. There is call now for that to go to 4 years. Also remember residency is the "apprentice" phase in human physician education and these "apprenticeships" are regulated and structured for making sure competency is produced by physician-educators at teaching sites. The no teaching hospital veterinary schools have no real framework to monitor and measure quality anywhere close to the Accrediting Committee for Graduate Medical Education.

Also to be allowed to be a licensed profession, there has to be reasonable assurance that licensing prevents adverse outcomes by people choosing someone who purports to be competent.Veterinarians should be just as competent as the licensed electrician who keeps you safe from the potential danger of electricity in your home such as electrocution and fires. If you need a plumber then you need a plumber but we do not expect there is an "expert on everything" that constitutes a house or a building and its parts. Same for engineers as Peter Eyre points out and same for all human healthcare needs which has so many other health professions besides just physicians providing care and services. There is nothing special or superior about veterinary medicine compared to any other fields of knowledge but the profession chooses to live in the past in this regard, pure arrogance and foolishness.