Under our bedroom window is the most beautiful climbing rose. Every spring it explodes into bloom with, surely hundreds of white flowers. It’s probably one of the reasons I was attracted to our house when we were looking to buy, but I can’t take any credit for it. The previous owners must have planted it and my husband looks after it by sometimes leaning precariously out of the first floor window and pruning it to the best of his abilities (badly)!
Last year a family of wood pigeons decided to build a nest in it. They must be the least graceful birds in existence. They flap their big old clumsy wings and always seem to be falling out of trees. Anyway, they laid their single egg and out hatched a little chick which they fed for a bit in their very over the top way. The chick got quite big and we could see its tail sticking out of the nest and I was pointing it out to the kids until one day I noticed that it hadn’t moved for a while. I was a bit gutted and tried not to explain to the kids that it had died (lazy parenting I know but they still were getting over losing our poor old cat and I just didn’t have the energy).
That was last year. Today, I heard a tap on my bedroom window and when I looked out a big, ugly young wood pigeon was trying to edge its way out of the nest. The kids and I looked on with a mixture of trepidation and delight but it was doing great. My daughter spotted it a few hours later on the wall in the back garden and we watched from a distance as its parents brought it food. I am really delighted by this, I’d like to think it was a sibling to the one from last year that has done rather better.
The fledgling being fed by its parents after leaving the nest has lots of parallels with our lives, work and parenting I guess, but today it made me ponder new graduate vets. There are loads of great graduate schemes now, in both independent and corporate practice and we’re all finding different ways to help our fledgling vets once they’ve left the safety of vet school. They absolutely still need our help in order for their careers to survive but I think, for those vets, like me that are really invested in the success of our new grads, one of the most tricky things to find is the right balance. How much to feed them and how much to let them fly. It’s tricky because the right balance is different for each grad and even different in each situation. They’ve got to graze their knees sometimes, as long as someone is there to help them up and dust them off (and pop a bit of jazzy vetrap on it).
I really enjoy mentoring new grads because, in my experience, they learn a lot really quickly. The best bit of all is when they start teaching the EMS students, and then they realise they actually know loads, or when the next year’s new grad comes to them for advice and they realise they’re the grown up one now.
I think more of us are realising now that mentoring new grads is about much more than the clinical know how. Although clinical knowledge is really important it can come from anybody in the team who’s around at the time. The stuff that you really need your mentor to be good at is listening with compassion. Because we all know the emotional load that this job can put on you. The most important questions that need to be answered are “how do I switch off when I get home?” or “how do I feel better about this post op complication?” or “how do I deal with this complaint?”
The fledgling analogy actually falls way short when describing the new grad\mentor relationship to be honest. The fledgling bird is a real drain on its parents and apart from propagation of their genes, surely they don’t get much in return, whereas when you get a new graduate in your practice the relationship is symbiotic, you can learn from each other and grow together. I’m sure I have learned as much from my new grads as they have learned from me. New techniques, research and different ways of thinking are always interesting and have helped evolve the way I work and manage the team.
So, we need to nurture our new graduate vets, as well as valuing them and what they bring to the team. They’re not new grads for very long, soon they will fledge and when they do, let’s make sure we’ve instilled not only a good breadth of clinical knowledge but also something about how to manage their emotions around difficult cases, how to find their niche in a team and, most importantly, how to ask for help, because there is never a point in our career when we stop needing it.
If you’re a new graduate vet and you would like support through this important transition, or a new clinical coach or GDP advisor and you would like a free chat about whether coaching can help you, have a look at our website www.thevetproject.co.uk/coaching
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