Is your time worth saving?

Do you never doubt your calling? A majority of large animal veterinarians face days that are booked solid. It doesn’t matter if they’re in an ambulatory setting, truck-in setting, or refer­ral setting; there simply is no shortage of work for large animal veterinarians. This fact is unlikely to change as the baby boomer veterinarians age out of practice and vet schools continue to see < 5% of their students practicing large animal medicine at one year post-graduation.1 Knowing this, how do practitioners avoid the feelings that are commonly associated with such demands upon their time; feelings of overwhelm, being overworked, and burned out? All of which are known to result in significant ill-being aka a lack of prosperity, happiness and health. The current state of the industry reminds the author of a quote from Philipp Stölzl’s The Physician in which a young physician (Robert Cole) questions his mentor (Ibn Sina) after a particular­ly deadly outbreak of plague strikes their city, asking him; “Do you never doubt your calling?” Ibn Sina then pauses in thought and responds; “Every Morning. Every Evening. In between, I work too hard to think about it.”29 This has become the default status within our realm of the veterinary industry. Practitioners can’t question their calling, their career, because they don’t have time to. They must keep plugging away day to day just to get the work done. However, this ignores several basic human needs, commonly referred to as “basic psychological needs” (BPN) which are necessary to craft motivation, create positive emotions and establish a state of flourishing. Basic psychological needs are governed by three unique entities; autonomy or a sense of control over our lives, competency or the ability to learn, interact and develop with our environment, and relatedness or the ability to build and foster meaningful relationships.2 Ironically, if we force large animal practitioners to slow down enough to reflect upon their best moments in medicine they often describe times in which they had felt free to fulfill these 3 basic needs. The question then becomes: how do we create more of these highly satisficing moments for practitioners? They will never be able to rid themselves of many of their less psychologically fulfilling duties. No matter what, things like rectal exams, foot work and routine surgery will always represent a primary av­enue of revenue and time commitment for them but could be considered mundane. Making the primary question; “How do practitioners find more time in an already busy day?” In order to do this, veterinarians must begin to redefine time, reconsider its value, reflect upon just how efficaciously it is used, and intensify its management.