Recipe for a perfect team

As I write this article, the weather is on the turn for the worse and the year is drawing to a close. The Great British Bake Off has finished and another person has been crowned the winner after weeks of trials and tribulations at the hands of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood.

I am sad about this until I realise it heralds the start of “Strictly” season and my other half heaves a big sigh of relief because he can now reclaim the remote control on a Wednesday evening.

My love of baking goes back a long way – I can remember making fairy cakes and gingerbread men with my mum as a child and also the annual ceremony of helping to stir the Christmas cake – but I also love the ritual of sitting down with a cup of tea, piece of cake and a good natter with friends and loved ones.

However, I am constantly fascinated and surprised by the complex alchemy involved in baking – how a group of seemingly simple ingredients can become such a sweet treat as a Victoria sponge, Bakewell tart, lemon drizzle cake or other such concoctions. How the introduction of air bubbles into sugar and fat as they are beaten together can then be stabilised into a well risen, light and fluffy cake. It occurs to me this mixing of separate ingredients into a single entity that works much better as a whole than each individual component does on its own, isn’t a bad analogy for a successful veterinary practice.

Follow a recipe

Let’s face it, who would sit down and eat a whole bowl of sugar, butter, flour, raw eggs or baking powder? It wouldn’t be appetising or very palatable, but mix them together and even raw the mixture is much more appealing.

This is also true of a veterinary practice – a receptionist with a telephone, but no vets or nurses to book appointments for isn’t much use and a practice manager with no practice to manage is the same. As for vets, where would we be without the array of support staff we rely on every day? We would find it much more difficult to cope and do our job to a high standard without a few helping hands.

Let’s think about what else it is that brings all the ingredients of a cake together and makes it turn out as it should.

Baking is about the only area of cooking where I actually follow recipes and this is because getting the quantities right and performing each step in the correct order and with the correct equipment is vital or it won’t work properly.

So, in a successful practice, each part of the team builds on and around the others to work properly, but we need the right quantities of each sector to allow the whole to work well. Excesses or deficiencies in any area will detract from the other parts and the whole won’t function as well or as smoothly as it could. However, each section also needs the right equipment to do its job properly, an up to date computer system, for example, or a well-stocked dispensary.

Also, the general set-up of the practice needs to flow well to make visits a good experience for both clients and patients alike. It may sound stupid and a bit obvious, but, for instance, there’d be no point entering the building into the operating theatre, the kennel room or even the staff room, so the design of the practice needs to ensure clients are guided to where they should be without realising it and the members of the practice team need the tools most relevant to their role easily at hand so that, as in baking a cake, things are done in the right order to ensure a successful outcome.

So what is the key to making a successful cake?

According to the oracle that is Delia Smith, confidence is the single most important thing and, after that, following a recipe properly and identifying where you went wrong if things don’t turn out quite as you hoped they would.

Most baking books have sections helping you identify what went wrong if your cake didn’t rise properly or was hard or overcooked. Unfortunately, veterinary medicine isn’t quite so straightforward and animals rarely read textbooks or react in a predictable way given the same sets of circumstances, so it isn’t always as easy to forecast an outcome or know exactly how to improve things next time.

However, we can always look back on a case and identify where things didn’t go according to plan and reflect on what we could have done differently so we may learn something from each experience and move forwards from it.

In life, as in baking and veterinary practice, preparation is the key; employing the right people in the right jobs with the right qualifications and experience is similar to making sure you have all the ingredients you need to hand and they are of sufficient quality and quantity for what you are baking.

Reading through the recipe before you begin is similar to reading up on a new surgical technique or way of doing things, and making sure you understand each step, the terminology used and what is expected of you along the way helps things run smoothly.

Making sure you have the right equipment to hand and know the correct way to use it is also important. In baking this helps your mixture come together and get into the oven without delay, but in surgery it is even more important as mistakes can result in far worse problems than all your fruit sinking to the bottom or a burned offering.

Baking has been around far longer than veterinary or even human medicine, with our very early ancestors making a type of bread from grains of wild grass seed soaked in water, which was then mashed into a kind of paste and cooked on hot, flat stones. This evolved into more elaborate baking over time and by the late 17th and 18th centuries baking much more as we know it today had arrived.

It can be seen through history that developments in baking go hand in hand with developments in technology, from baking on hot stone plates or open fires to enclosed ovens being developed and with new ingredients being available such as sugar and spices from overseas or others such as flour becoming more refined. Nowadays even your microwave can be used to bake a cake.

There are several different methods for mixing your ingredients to make a cake. You often start by beating or creaming sugar and butter together and then gradually adding eggs and flour, but many recipes will use the “all in one” method where all the ingredients go into the bowl together right at the beginning. Beyond this, many specialist techniques can be mastered for baking and decorating an array of items.

Understanding goals

This is also true in veterinary practices, where different set-ups exist, different species are treated and different levels of specialisation occur, but as long as everyone understands what they are trying to achieve and what goals the practice has for both the short and longer terms then good client care and good standards of veterinary medicine can be achieved.

To summarise, making a delicious cake involves the bringing together of separate and distinctly different ingredients to produce an end product greater than the sum of its constituent parts, using the right quantities, techniques and equipment to produce something appealing and successful that could also be a very viable business prospect in the right hands and really, how different is that to veterinary medicine?