Christmas can be a really difficult time of year for many people; there is the financial aspect of the season, but also the emotional aspect. Within the practice, the season can cause extra stresses with covering the rota, always a contentious issue; additional emergencies with ingestion of festive foods; and then there's the associated stress of people descending on your house and all the extra food that needs to be prepared.
Many people find the season a time for reflection, whether it be the end of the year or the start of a new one. It's an opportunity to draw a line under one year and start anew on the next. What went well this year, what didn't; do we need to put procedures in place to avoid the mistakes from last year? How can we grow as a group and as individuals? What stresses were there during the last Christmas period, how can we avoid the same happening this year?
An excellent place to start with in practice is with a journal club. Take an article that you feel could benefit the practice. An excellent example would be Samantha Flavell's piece on Quality of Life Scales on pages 533–537. Everyone in the journal club needs to read the article and then you all discuss it: is this something we could introduce to our way of working? How would it fit in? Is it of benefit to our patients, their owners and to us? Reflecting on ‘can we do things better’, really does help the general work ethos, placing it in a positive, supportive learning environment rather than one with a blame culture.
The use of certain protocols and guidelines doesn't just impact on the patient's outcomes but can also greatly influence working practices. Using patient-friendly handling practices (as in Sarah Vivian's article on pp 522–526, and Jenni Nellist's equine article pp 540–545), can help reduce the stress levels not just in the patients, but also in the personnel handling them, and can ultimately prevent someone being kicked, bitten or scratched. If we can make the working environment a better place to be in, this does ultimately benefit us all, as well as our patients.
Let's celebrate everything that we have achieved in the last year, let's make an effort to focus on the positive and make plans about how next year will be even better, more productive, more enjoyable. This can be within the nursing profession as a whole, or what your own nursing team has done, or just you on your own. Do you have a notice board on which you could put ‘thank you notes’, not just from the clients but from each other? One of the most important factors that people state about job satisfaction is that someone took the time to appreciate the work and the effort that they put in.
Be kind, be understanding, don't judge (you won't know the history behind that issue — on most occasions) your work colleagues and your clients. Think about opportunities to disseminate information about mental health support. We have posters on the back of the toilet doors with support numbers and resources. How can we support each other more?
It's the start to a new decade, let's make it the best one yet for the veterinary nursing profession, and for us as individuals (and of course for our patients and their owners).
We hope you enjoy this issue.