Shaan has been a veterinary nurse for twenty years, working in many different areas including general practice, specialist surgery, emergency and critical care and management. She has also taught veterinary nursing and animal studies to students at technical college. She is a qualified counsellor and is now focused on providing mental health services and training to the industry. She is currently a student of occupational therapy and is completing a masters in mental health simultaneously. She lives in Perth, Western Australia with her family and furkids.
Meet Shaan:
Six years ago, I decided that I would start to embark on a career change. I wanted to explore the human medical field. I liked the idea of occupational therapy because it meant I could help people improve their everyday lives. I, therefore, enrolled at a university to become an occupational therapist (OT). An OT is someone who helps you do the things you want to do. It is a broad profession with many specialities. Some of the areas OTs focus on are paediatrics, geriatrics, and rehabilitation, both in the hospital and community.
It didn’t take me long to work out that mental health was an area in which I wanted to be involved, so I set the goal of becoming an OT who specialises in mental health.
In 2021 I was accepted to do my masters of mental health, so I am well and truly on the way to achieving my goal. I am extremely proud of this.
Alongside my university studies, I have been working in veterinary practices on a part-time/locum basis. My original plan was to leave the veterinary industry when I finished university but now I have found a way to blend the two.
Over the years, I have been saddened by the ongoing mental health crisis that the veterinary industry has experienced. The most pressing and acute issue is the high rate of suicides in the profession. A study: Suicide in veterinarians and veterinary nurses in Australia: 2001–2012 AJ Milner, H Niven, K Page and AD LaMontagne, found that the standardised mortality ratio of vets was 1.92 and vet nurses was 1.24 to the general population.
This is shocking! To address this issue, we must discover what the root causes are and hit them at a base level.
I started to feel a pull towards becoming part of the solution. For a long time, however, it remained only a fragment of an idea as I was so busy with all of the balls I had in the air.
I could only identify that the industry needed more support not just from generic mental health professionals, but from people who knew what we go through in this industry.
At the start of 2020, I found myself completely burnt out due to the challenges of working in a few different toxic workplaces over the years. Although stressful at the time, I am grateful for the experience as I got to see, first-hand, how bad it can get and this prompted me to start Veterinary Connect.
After I had left that environment, I wished to go back into another workplace straight away but I knew I needed to stop and rest for a while. The decision was ultimately made for me in the end with COVID-19 rearing its ugly head.
I knew that I needed to seize on the downtime I was being given and started to use the negative experiences I had been through to drive my passion for change.
It was in March 2020 that Veterinary Connect was born and I have spent the last year building up a catalogue of resources for people in the veterinary industry, that can help to support their mental health. I want to help people find ways to cope with their struggles so that they can carry out the tasks they used to do and engage in the community.
One of the services I provide is counselling, delivered by me, a fully qualified counsellor who has twenty years of nursing experience to draw on when helping others.
The feedback from my clients is that it is extremely helpful to have someone to talk to who knows exactly what day-to-day work life is like and who has been through similar issues.
I have a good base of clients from the industry across all areas. It tends to be vet nurses and young females who reach out.
My counselling training originally came from the units I covered on my OT course but I also completed a diploma qualification last year to make it official.
As well as counselling, I organise training sessions in person and online. I offer workplace consultancy and individualised training, where I can come into the workplace and do an in-depth analysis of where the staff are at and what they need to feel supported in the workplace. This can be invaluable especially if a clinic is experiencing high staff turnover or other issues.
I have also collaborated with the online learning platform Veterinary Webinurse, where all my webinars are now live.
The available webinars to watch are:
- Maintaining self-care
- How to manage anxiety
- Dealing with difficult clients
- How to have difficult conversations with staff members
- Purpose or profit? How to motivate your team to succeed without focusing on figures
- Navigating different personality types and staff personal issues
You can catch them at www.veterinarywebinurse.com
My ultimate aim is to develop leadership training for anyone entering or looking to train further in a management role. I think practice managers receive very limited training on how to lead a team.
Most of the guidance has been given by clinic owners whose main concern is on performance that leads to sales and not necessarily what leads to creating a happy team. I believe that a happy and supported team who find their careers to be rewarding will naturally want to achieve for their company.
I would love to give managers the tools to help them become true leaders using care and empathy. To equip employers and managers with the skills and knowledge they need to support their staff. Including how to treat people as members of a team and not just people you manage.
You can find more details about my services on my website.
I also have a blog called ‘The Veterinary Files’ which you can find here.
Further posts…
A Vet Nurse Experiencing Workplace Bullying
Meet a vet nurse: For those of you living through dire days due to workplace bullying, here is my story… Be they peers or bosses, bullying colleagues unquestionably make you dread walking into work. I’m here to tell you…
A Vet Nurse Working with Anxiety
Lauren graduated from university in 2016 and has since been working at small animal practices in the North West. She is passionate about all aspects of nursing, particularly animal welfare, feline and exotic nursing and nurse consulting. Meet Lauren:…
A Blushing Vet Nurse
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions Charles Darwin Meet Sophie: This will be by far the most stripped-back story I will personally publish on this blog. And to be fair, the most in-depth account…
Veterinary Blog 