The 100th Edition of Weekend Rounds

Hello and welcome to a very special 100th edition of Weekend Rounds!

That’s right - this is the 100th time we’ve gathered the latest from across veterinary education, entertainment, and news and delivered it to your inbox on a Sunday.

We’re going to take a moment to celebrate and reward you - our faithful readers. But as always, we’ll also cover the latest from #vetmed:

Here’s what we’re covering today:

🥳 Celebrating 100 Editions of Weekend Rounds!
📩 Share Weekend Rounds to win
💊 WSAVA Essential Medicines Lists
🏥 Why pet owners are putting off visits to the vet
🤷 Adrian Chiles apologizes

🥳 Celebrating 100 Editions of Weekend Rounds!

While we usually try to avoid making the newsletter about us, we hope you’ll forgive us this one time because we’ve been reflecting on the journey and we’re proud of the community we’ve created. Thank you for being along for the ride!

When we launched Obi Veterinary Education, we saw an opportunity to provide vets with with comprehensive veterinary education, broken down into manageable chunks. We’re up to over 26 hours of on-demand lessons with even more coming in early 2024. And as the Obi community grew, we started to wonder what other value we could provide that would further our vision of advancing pet care and veterinarian well-being.

And that was the impetus to launch Weekend Rounds… our sometimes goofy, always factual, and mostly weekly newsletter that focuses on the best parts of veterinary medicine and how it intersects with the wider world. Because happier vets means healthier pets.

And here we are… 100 editions of Weekend Rounds later. If you’re a recent addition to crew and looking to catch up, here are some of our favorite editions:

• The time ChatGPT diagnosed a dog

• The time we covered 2,000 years of veterinary medicine

• The time we learned about crocodile parthenogenesis

• The time those sheep kept walking in circles in China

• And of course… the time we met the bear who fought the Nazis

Weekend Rounds would be nothing without you - our wonderful readers. So now that we’re done our trip down memory lane let’s look ahead. Let us know what you’d like to see more of:

We can’t wait to see what the next 100 newsletters bring!

📩 Share Weekend Rounds to win

If you’re still reading this, we have a hunch that you like Weekend Rounds and think that maybe your friends and colleagues might like it too.

So to celebrate our 100th edition, we’re giving away some great prizes just for sharing the love!

Here’s how it works:

• Use your referral link below to share Weekend Rounds with colleagues, classmates, friends, and more.

• For every person who subscribes using your referral code until Dec 9th, you’ll be entered to win one of:

  • $50 Amazon Gift Card

  • $50 FIGS Gift Card

  • One Year All Access Pass on Obi Veterinary Education

Every referral is an entry, so the more you share the more chances to win!

💊 WSAVA Essential Medicines List

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association has released the second edition of the Essential Medicines List for Cats and Dogs in the Journal of Small Animal Practice. To address variations in the accessibility of basic medicines around the world, which affects the ability of veterinarians to deliver minimum standards of veterinary practice the list “helps veterinarians around the world to provide proper preventive care and to treat the most frequent and important diseases in dogs and cats, while maintaining appropriate animal welfare standards.”

🏥 AVMA: Clients are delaying veterinary visits

Although pet populations continue to rise along with veterinary practice revenues, the number of client visits appears to be falling.

Between August 2021 and August 2023, client visits fell 2.7% while revenues increased 5.7% - a fairly strong indication that pet owners are becoming increasingly sensitive to the rising cost of veterinary services and are delaying visits to the veterinarian.

Another telling metric is lapsed visits - defined as patients who haven’t been to a veterinary practice in 14 to 18 months. According to the AVMA, lapsing patients per practice increased significantly per practice between January 2020 and July 2023:

To further illustrate the point, VetSource data shows that sick visits are down 0.17%, wellness visits are down 0.45%; surgery visits are down 3.96%, and dental visits were down 3.8%.

It’s clear that economic pressures are causing owners to visit the vet less or extend the time between visits.

Oh, and as a follow up to our recent coverage of Adrian Chiles’ article in The Guardian… he apologized: