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Weekend Rounds!

This week, you may notice we've made some slight updates to the email in hopes of educating, entertaining, and bringing a little bit of joy into your inbox every week. Let us know what you think by replying to this email!

- The Obi Veterinary team

The Headlines

The Economic Toll of Burnout

We all know burnout is an important challenge in the lives of veterinary professionals. As

the AVMA wrote this week

, a new study from Cornell looks at the economic toll of burnout on the profession. The authors estimate that $1 billion is lost to burnout each year. This is about 2% of revenue for veterinary practices in 2020. Perhaps this incentive can help shift the conversation about burnout.

Far too often the conversations about burnout focus on what you as a veterinarian can do to fix your own burnout. Meditate more. Express more gratitude. Find time to exercise. As if the problem lies with us not doing enough.

But the authors here point instead to concrete actions that practices can take to fix burnout in their clinic:

• Hold monthly meetings to focus on work-life challenges and difficult issues in management of patient care.

• Improve workflow by offloading nonessential tasks to non-veterinarian staff members.

• Remove bottlenecks in patient rooms with regard to medication reconciliation, vaccinations, and data entry.

• Reduce time pressure with plans for future increases in visit time for primary care.

• Institute a new prescription phone line to free up veterinary technicians if the practice has a pharmacy in house or other ways to distribute food or flea and tick medications.

• Present work-life data as a platform to discuss issues within the clinic.

These sound like great steps and we hope every corporation, school and every individual practice will take these steps to improve life for veterinarians. In our opinion, it is up to the corporations and practice owners to make the changes.

Virtual Education for Iowa State Students

Iowa State University’s

College of Veterinary Medicine

has started using virtual telehealth technology to allow students to see more cases than they would using traditional approaches. In partnership with private livestock farming companies, students have been able to see more animals and review more cases than they would in their typical in-person studies. The use of telemedicine, especially in veterinary education, is still in its infancy but adoption has been accelerated due to the pandemic.

We're in favour of educational innovation that equips vets entering the workforce and supports them as they continue their practice. While it will never replace hands-on education, finding ways to provide more experiences to veterinarians in training is always a good thing.

Trivia

How many Dr. Dolittle movies have been released?

Bonus points if you can guess the years of release. Check the bottom of this email for the answer.

Your weekly dopamine

A video recorded earlier this year is making its way around the internet again this week where a bull elephant plays a prank on a tourist at Imire Rhino and Wildlife Conservancy in Zimbabwe by stealing her hat and returning it a moment later.

Honestly, it's a pretty solid joke and made even more impressive that the elephant has the intelligence and charisma to pretend to eat the hat before handing it back to its owner. Great stuff all around from Mac the elephant.

#LearnWithObi

Looking to get those last few RACE-approved hours in before the end of the year? Check out Obi's newest RACE-approved certificates:

Trivia Answer

There have been

seven

theatrical adaptations of the children's book series:

Doctor Dolittle - 1967

Dr. Dolittle - 1998

Dr. Dolittle 2 - 2001

Dr. Dolittle 3 - 2006

Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief - 2008

Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts - 2009

Dolitte - 2020

Let us know what you'd like to see in future editions of Weekend Rounds by replying to this email.