A day in the life...

of a Veterinary Nurse at Cootes

 A veterinary nurse plays a vital and varied role in the running of a veterinary practice. As well as assisting with the operations and maintaining anaesthetics, a nurse has a wide specturm of other tasks including; assisting vets during consults, taking blood samples and placing animals on intravenous fluids. Admitting and discharging of patients is the job of the nurse as is continued patient care. Take a look at the diary below to follow just some of the tasks that your vet nurse will do during the course of a day at Cootes.

Time to open up the practice and check the practice diary for today's operations and procedures.

Today's blood sample patients start to arrive, so I take them to our prep room and take the bloods for the required tests. Most of the tests are carried out on our own blood machine, so my next job is to prepare patients that require pre-op blood samples. As we have our own machine, the results are immediate.

My patients are now admitted either by the vets or my fellow nurses.They are checked and given a painkiller and sedative, and are settled in the kennel room. I now administer fluid therapy to patients admitted for dehydration or prior to surgery. We have two pieces of intravenous fluid equipment that are invaluable to patient care. We have an infusion pump, which was kindly donated by one of our clients as a 'thank you' for caring for her cat. The infusion pump is used on cats to closely regulate the amount of fluid administered. The second piece of equipment is the fluid heater, which allows us to warm the fluid as it is being administered. This particularly helps with hypothermic patients as well as just making fluid therapy more comfortable for the animal.

The day's drugs and supplies order arrives - which I check and unpack. The day's surgery begins and we plan our theatre list. I set up the theatre and prep room and the vets start to undertake the list of inpatients. It is my responsibility to choose the most suitable anaesthetic equipment, circuits and surgical equipment for each procedure, in consultation with the vets. The first patient's anaesthetic begins and I follow this patient from preparation to theatre and back to the kennel room for recovery. Sometimes my role in theatre is to prepare the patient in a sterile fashion, i.e. clip and clean the operation site. I will also scrub in, should the vet ask me to do so.

All theatre is now complete and all the patients are in the kennel room, either recovering from surgery or in for observation. There are some patients that are in for blood pressure checks or stimulation blood samples, these are also my responsibility.

Providing we don't have any emergenies, it's time to start the cleaning process and then set-up for evening consultations. Each week, the nurses run a Puppy Party with an informative talk for the owners and the opportunity for the puppies to play together and become socialised with other dogs.

Evening consults start and owners come to collect their pets. I am responsible for discharging the inpatients. Also the vets may need me to assist in consults with administering treatment, applying dressings and helping to hold more difficult patients! I'm also responsible for carrying out a thorough check of the practice for any drugs and consumables that need to be ordered for the next day.

At the end of the day, it is time to clean reception and the consultation rooms, and to shut up shop ready for the next day.....

Above all, these tasks and responsibilities allow the veterinary nurses here at Cootes to ensure that your pet has the very highest care whilst they are with us. We will treat your pet as if it were our own!