There are moments in history when one is aware that we all sit, without any ability to alter the course of events, on the edge of something momentous.
My generation, and that of my children, has so far, at least, never known what it is to be involved in a war – something for which we should all be immensely thankful. Of course, we have had servicemen and women tragically killed or injured in action, but the nation has not been at war as we were in either of the two Great Wars of the past century.
As I write this, European leaders are preparing to meet for a final summit, and by the time this edition goes to print, our gavotte towards the back door of Europe will have been decided.
By whom and with what outcome remains to be seen, but the entire nation must be feeling, as I do, that few things are more uncomfortable than to be involved in a process to which we have little or no input. It’s hard to see how that can do anything other than to depress morale and make uncertainty a feature of daily life. Of course, our exit from Europe is not war – bizarrely, the European Union was first conceived to minimise the chances of another such war – but it is similarly momentous in many ways.
On the one hand, this is serious stuff with long-lasting consequences, but is it really new? The writer Ben Schott has recently published a novel, Jeeves and the King of Clubs, which is an homage to PG Wodehouse and contains the following currently apposite paragraph:
“Storm clouds loom over Europe. Treason is afoot in the highest social circles. The very security of the nation is in peril.”
Schott does a sterling job of parody for Wodehouse – so much so that one could be forgiven for wondering if the great man had written the words himself, but, in the early part of the 20th century, such a description would have been a serious observation, and one can take a step back and recognise that, although it may be radically different after the event, life still goes on pretty much at the same speed as before.
Changes
If the nation has grown tired of endless waiting and the familiar feeling of dejá vu, this veterinary profession might be able to teach it a thing or two. Over the past 30 years, the profession has seen innumerable changes to the way it practises, the way it employs its workforce, the way it interacts with consumers, and the way it now has to compete in a wider and more aggressive marketplace.
Very few, if any, of these changes have been brought about by careful consideration and planning by the profession, and few could say that the way in which we all work is as relaxed as it was back then.
Indeed, not much in life is as relaxed and little doubt can exist that many of the things that concern our profession – such as stress and anxiety, the relentless competition for a share of the static marketplace between a steadily rising number of practices, the constant struggle with work-life balance and the pet owners’ delight in internet sales – contribute to the mounting concern that many within the profession share.
If, as a recent survey by BEVA and the BSAVA suggested, almost half of all UK vets were considering leaving their job within the next two years and more than a fifth regret choosing the career in the first place, that is a problem. Movement between jobs has always existed, and new graduates would expect to move between practices – and, often, between species. We have a highly feminised profession and that will always incur some degree of career sacrifice as female vets are more likely to stay at home to raise children than their male counterparts – and especially so as we have yet to establish gender equality in pay. So, it’s not necessarily the movement that rings alarm bells, but we should be concerned about the reasons why.
As Alison Lambert from Onswitch said: “We can fix management by training people properly, we can sort salaries by paying people more and we can address work-life balance… but hating our clients is about attitude and I think this shows that we have an issue that goes beyond recruitment.”
Engage and embrace
However we view it, the current business model revolves around the need to engage and embrace our pool of clients, and this inescapable fact of business life is not something that can be addressed with CPD over a pizza in someone’s kitchen. It is so fundamental to the way we work and yet its importance seems to have been less of a vital building block in the training of graduates over a lengthy period.
As with all things attitudinal, it comes down to expectation and how we manage that. I would question how we can continue to pay graduates more within an outdated business model, and that too revolves around expectation on the part of the workforce and employers, but one cannot fault the logic that a dislike of clients is by far the hardest thing to fix.
The current business model requires managers to take action, but on a practice-by-practice basis, whereas the scale of the problem suggests this is an area where the entire profession should unite, from the vet schools through to employers, with real harmony in their approach. That requires leadership within the profession as a whole, rather than addressing the workplace culture in a piecemeal fashion.
Our country has sought, but not found, direction over, a profoundly confused period of immersion in political egocentricity. We can be thankful that the brightly coloured display of ego has never been a factor in the development of this gentle profession, but in the uncertainty that will inevitably arise from whatever outcome has taken place at the end of October, this profession will need clear, pragmatic and centralised leadership on a hitherto unfound scale if it is to be able to contest for its fair share of business without further sacrificing the mental health and well-being of its workforce.