26 Aug 2015
Dave Nicol
Job Title
IMAGE: ©Ross1248/iStock
Dave Nicol turned his world upside down when he moved to Sydney in 2009 to open his own veterinary practice. Working in Australia has proved to be a learning curve; here are his five top tips for colleagues back home.
Aussies tend to take themselves a little bit less seriously than us Brits. “Mate-ship” is a central theme of life here and it certainly makes life in practice a lot of fun. There’s a real sense of “we all have each other’s back”.
People like to laugh and things are a little less formal. One nice touch is in how we address clients. In the UK it was always “Mr” or “Mrs” client’ whereas here we’re almost always on first-name terms. It’s a layer of formality that helps us to break down barriers and appear less like scary doctors.
Taking a break from the travails of life in practice is important. Holidays, of course, do us the world of good. But taking a mini-timeout each day is just as important (and remedial). One of my favourite activities is to take two to three mindful minutes to listen to the birds sing. There’s nothing quite like the sound of a laughing kookaburra in the morning or as restful as the tuneful whistles of magpies in the evening to help maintain gratitude in your heart.
Given the huge uptake and reliance on pet insurance in the UK, it was with a certain degree of trepidation I began life in a market where uptake is somewhere south of five per cent.
But I soon found owners here in Sydney are more than happy to put their hands in their pockets to look after their pets. Our clinic is a fairly high achiever in terms of insured patients, but we’re nowhere near 20 per cent. Yet our profitability is more than double that I was able to achieve in the UK.
The take-home message is that good communication and service are just as (if not more so) important as insurance.
Clinical standards here in Sydney are very high (comparable to the UK) with just one major blind spot – dentistry. For some reason, Aussie vets seem hell bent on delegating the dental side of the profession to the local butcher. Almost without exception the advice is to offer chicken wings or bones to clean your pet’s teeth.
As you might expect, I see a lot of broken carnassial teeth, yet weirdly the incidence of periodontal disease seems no better than the UK or US (where bone feeding is widely discouraged).
Quite why Aussie vets have adopted a “bones over brushing” mentality is anyone’s guess. Things are slowly improving, but it’s perplexing nonetheless.
After I graduated I got a good start with Croft Vets. But it’s not like this for many new graduates who are treated poorly and burn out. Since opening my own practice I have taken on a new graduate each year and put them through a 12-month structured training and supportive coaching programme.
The results surpassed my ambition and within three to six months each graduate has begun to pay his or her way. By the end of the 12 months they are far better clinicians than I was at the same age and are looking forward to a career built on this solid foundation. It’s great to see this young talent flourish.
