One of the hardest parts of starting to work as a vet in practice is learning to cope with both the lack of sleep and regularly disturbed sleep. We are required by law to provide a 24/7 service, and although some small animal practices have delegated their out-of-hours cover to specialist emergency clinics, this is not really logistically possible for equine practices. This means that, on occasion, the vet that you see at 5pm one evening may have been up and working for 36hrs straight. Quite often I have returned the following morning to re-visit I horse I saw in the middle of the night to find the client surprised to see me, expecting me to have the day off following a night on-call. If only!
To be honest as a new graduate I found this all relatively easy. Sure, as students we were used to working all day in the vet school, going out clubbing at night and turning up to spend the following day in clinics and lectures relatively bushy-tailed, if less bright of eye; all on the briefest of catnaps. And this was long before the advent of Red Bull! Nowadays I'm not sure whether it is age creeping up on me, or whether it has all worn a little thin after a couple of decades of being available to the horse-owing public round the clock, but I'm struggling.
Some colleagues report that they sleep very poorly when on-call, with one ear always half open for the shrill of the mobile phone. This has never been my experience. Like a cat I sleep any time, anywhere. Some would find it impossible to be roused from their bed by a 1am call, return to their bed at 3am and get back to sleep. Not me: my eyes are often closed before my head hits the pillow. I suspect that over the years this trait has served me well.
The cruelest call is the one which arrives 10 minutes after you have gone to sleep for the night. You leap to the phone, convinced that it is nearly morning, only to find that it is just minutes since you went to sleep. The feeling is hard to describe, but it is immensely disorientating. The call that you get just as you are pulling back into your drive after a night-time outing, making you set straight out for another, comes a close second in the cruelty stakes.
Although I am writing, as always, slightly in jest, I do feel that it's a serious subject. We don't get paid any more for turning out at any hour of the day or night. I often feel that I am not working at full capacity the day following a disturbed night. On extreme occasions I have felt unsafe driving and at risk of falling asleep at the wheel. It seems that there is little that can be done about it though. It's a 'suck it up' situation. For equine practices to operate at a staffing level that allowed for separate day and night staff they would have to raise the cost of veterinary provision to a level which the public would not accept. Don't get me wrong, we're not up all night, every night. However there comes a point where chronic lack of sleep and disturbed sleep impacts on your ability to function safely, your ability to provide a top quality service to your clients, your social life, your relationships, even your health. We all signed up for this. We all knew what we were getting ourselves into. We all, to some degree, suck it up and cope. It doesn't necessarily make it an ideal situation though.
No comments:
Post a Comment