Hiring right now is brutal.  Too many jobs, not enough vets, and a constant merry-go-round of people jumping ship.  Most leaders throw up their hands and blame “the market.” But when you do that, you give up control. The truth? Most practices aren’t giving anyone a compelling reason to choose them. If your job ad looks just like every other one out there – full of the same old buzzwords – then vets are going to make their choice based on two things: pay and location. That’s a race you can’t...

You've heard of Halstead's first principles, no doubt. But these are, it turns out, incomplete. Here are some tough lessons—experienced, observed, or shared from the operating theatres of veterinary medicine - which ought to be included in the next edition of Fossum. Feel free to forward this to the editor. Make big flaps.  The little skinny things tend to go wrong. As a vet dentist, I was thinking of the oral cavity as I wrote this, but it’s a reasonable enough thing to say outside the mouth...

F@%k! I could cry. It’s not so much the physical pain - that’s a one out of ten. It’s the emotional pain of seeing three years of near-daily work undone in a twist of gristle. But I better tell you what’s going on before I lose you completely. On Monday, with much frowning from my coach Mike Porteous , I attended my first track session of the year. Track, if you’ve not been near one since a sadistic teacher drove you around it in gym class, is where you go to run fast. And, in many cases—me...