10 Sept 2018
Being an on call farm vet shouldn't all be stressful, there's many ways to make it much more manageable by finding a good place for your mobile telephone, having a sympathetic friend and conditioning your hair.
Ami Sawran
Job Title
Find a place for your phone and leave it there, advises Ami. Image © Rawpixel.com / Adobe Stock
Out of hours can be chaotic, especially as a new graduate, but some elements of it you can control to make a potentially stressful night or weekend a little easier on yourself.
These are just some of the things that have worked for me in farm practice.
Find a place for your mobile telephone. I have a spot for upstairs and a spot for downstairs, where it can be heard across the floor. If your house is enviably vast, have some hubs in various rooms.
If you have it constantly on your person while at home, you’ll end up losing your mind frantically checking it or losing it down the side of the sofa, and nobody needs that 10 seconds of panic.
Pick a spot with solid reception, lay a pad and pen next to it, and get on with your life. Don’t take it to the toilet. Are you really going to answer it on there? No, you’re not. Does your client need to hear that? No, they don’t.
When you get a proper emergency telephone call, the instinct may be to drop everything and rush out. That’s when you forget things and make mistakes.
Make life easier for yourself – take two minutes to make sure you have the essentials you’ll need for the journey (even if that’s to nip to the loo and grab some water) and appointment.
If it’s a case you don’t have experience with, prepare to telephone a colleague on the way, or grab some notes to check before you get to the farm. That’s not to say you should luxuriate in the shower for 10 minutes or start grinding your finest arabica, but a minute or two to prepare a plan of action at home and get yourself work-ready is worth 10 when you’re on farm, stressed and potentially out of signal.
Prepare as much as you can prior to a night or weekend call, and it will be significantly less stressful.
Make sure your car has enough fuel, that you have your wallet in your bag or in the car, check your drug and equipment stocks, and have spare, clean waterproofs. Take spare waterproofs so if you get too dirty to properly disinfect on farm, you can bag them and have clean ones ready.
Lay out your work clothes so you can grab them easily. Stash some snacks in the car, too – you never know when one call is going to turn into three.
While you’re at it, prep your meals in advance – there is nothing more smugly satisfying than coming home to a ready made meal you can simply throw at a heat source. Few things are more disheartening than coming home exhausted to an empty fridge and no motivation to do anything about it.
It’s very easy to feel isolated and chained to the house when you’re on call – and while I’m not saying you should make theatre reservations, it definitely helps to get out. As long as you’re in spitting distance of your car, you can usually mooch around town, run errands, enjoy a retail park (I love a retail park) or take a walk.
The best thing would be to ask your new colleagues what they do when on call – where are the safe zones? Where are the reception black spots? What do they recommend? Every practice will have slightly different policies and it pays to know.
It WILL depress you to repeatedly deprive yourself of basic human interaction all in the name of being on call, so if you have a sympathetic friend who doesn’t mind you randomly abandoning them – invite them over.
That said, if you just want to vegetate in front of Netflix, go for your life. Be good to yourself – you’re already working; you don’t need to have grand plans of achieving anything else.
I have this thing where I deep condition my hair when I’m on call. This only really works if you have long hair you care about conditioning, but I figure it’s a good time to walk around with a slightly sticky looking bun on my head. What has four legs and doesn’t care what your hair looks like? A cow.
Although conditioner, I have found, makes it easier to rinse out an errant poo, you don’t just have to tend to your hair; you could soak your feet or stick a five-minute face mask on (I’ve only been caught out with this once).
If beautification isn’t your thing, you could always do a therapeutic task such as clearing out your wardrobe, cleaning the house or pottering around the garden – things you can dip in and out of work best and still make you feel productive.
You are absolutely not alone in being apprehensive about being on call, but remember, you should be afforded a backup system in your practice, even if that is over the telephone.
Make sure you know who will be available to you, and don’t avoid asking for help for fear of looking stupid. We were all new to this once and no good mentor is going to make you feel bad for trying to do the right thing. Your questions are valid and your well-being is important.
Make that call if you need to and don’t take any stick for being the new kid either – you are the best available qualified person to do that call in that moment. It’s going to get easier, especially if you’re kind to yourself in the process.
