Starting clinical placements may seem scary. You are in your clinical years now, so you can’t get away with merely observing; the pressure is on you to learn and do. You may have booked your next EMS placement months (occasionally, years!) ago, and now the time has come to start. To ease those nerves, here are our 10 Top Tips for clinical EMS placements:

Tip 1: Prepare

As the saying goes, ‘prior preparation prevents poor performance’. A bit of planning will never go amiss, and it’s always a good idea to email the practice a few weeks in advance and ask any questions you may have. You don’t want to panic on Sunday night before the placement because you don’t know which branch to go to! Ensure you know when to arrive on the first day, where to park, what to bring, and what to wear.

Ensure you have the correct clothes and footwear ready in advance. Farm and equine placements usually require waterproofs, boilersuits, PPE and appropriate shoes—you don’t want to turn up at a fancy racing yard in white trainers covered in mud. Check what is expected on small animal placements, too—do you need to bring your own crocs and scrubs, or will they be provided? It is wise ALWAYS to bring a spare pair of clothes. They can be left in your car or the corner in the practice, but you don’t want to walk around all day covered in bodily fluids!

Bringing a packed lunch is always a good idea, too, as there may be no shops or time to nip out to buy lunch.

Tip 2: Book different practices and species

It is advisable to book EMS across several different practices and with different species. Even if you’re dead set on working with smallies, doing at least a few weeks in farm and equine will be helpful. Unless you try it, you’ll never know if it suits you, and you don’t want to reach your final year before doing your first farm animal placement and falling in love with it. You will also learn different skills from different placements, so doing a variety will broaden your horizons, e.g., by communicating with different people (both colleagues and clients), seeing different management styles, and learning clinical skills.

Tip 3: Embrace car chats

A big part of farm and equine EMS is travelling! When in the vet’s car, it can be a great time to chat and brush up on your clinical knowledge. It is nice to talk about what case you’ll see next so you know what to expect when you arrive, and a debrief after a visit can also consolidate your knowledge. Some vets are very chatty; you’ll get to know them well. Others may ask you lots of questions and be keen to teach you. You’ll also meet vets who aren’t so chatty and prefer to listen to the radio, and that’s also fine - especially if they were on call and only had 3 hours of sleep the night before!

Tip 4: Be proactive

It's a cliché, but the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. If you want to master something specific, like placing catheters or taking blood, ask. If the staff know your goals for the placement, they can help you achieve them. A well-placed note on the ops board saying you want to place catheters this week can serve as a good reminder so you don’t get forgotten about when things get busy.

Remember, when treating an animal with the owner present, you may have less scope to do things than you would otherwise. The vets will know the individual clients and be able to gauge how much you can do–they will know which farmers don’t like students giving injections and which ones are happy for students to castrate all their calves. Equally, a highly prized racehorse is not probably the best candidate to try your first i.v. injection on, so be proactive but realistic too!

Tip 5: Make friends with the nurses

Nurses are vital team members and can make or break your placement. Although you will focus on the vets’ work in your clinical placements, the nurses are often better placed to help you with skills such as anaesthetic set-up and monitoring, i.v. catheter placement, blood sampling, etc. Be kind to them, respectful, and always offer to help. It will pay to have them on your side; they will be more inclined to want to help you if they see initiative and a willingness to learn. Offer to make up a kennel when you see they’re busy, and try to get to know them personally, too – it will help build that important rapport.

Tip 6: If you’re told to go home, go home!

Yes, really. You may want to show willingness and worry about missing out on something, but there’s no point in hanging around late in case something comes in. Downtime is essential, too, and you have many weeks of placements ahead. If you want to be involved in emergency work, you can always ask to be called out of hours or consider booking a future EMS placement in this area.

Tip 7: Different placement, different benefits

You’ll love some placements, and others will fall short of your expectations, but you’ll learn things either way. Teamwork and communication are vital skills; you can work on them even in a placement where you aren’t developing your clinical skills as much as you want. It’s good to see how a well-oiled team runs, but you can also learn a lot from seeing how not to communicate or behave! There will undoubtedly be some practices you won’t rush to book any more weeks but try to take to the positives from each placement–even the valuable non-clinical skills.

Tip 8: Be yourself

Everyone is different and learns in various ways. Do your best to communicate with the team about anything you are struggling with – often, issues are resolved once they are understood. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not; this will make the placement more stressful and scary. As with all walks of life, you will ‘click’ with some people better than others, but always be polite, gracious and discreet – attributes that will serve you well throughout your career.

Tip 9: Don’t compare yourself to others

Some people will do cat castrates in their first week of clinical EMS, while others may never do one before graduating. Try not to be disheartened if your friends seem to be doing more than you. It is human nature to compare, but you will do things your friends have not done, and vice versa. Every placement will be different, and you will never be able to do everything before graduating. Regardless of your EMS experience, your learning curve after graduation will be huge, so although it may feel like you’re not doing enough as a student, it will all level out after a few months at your first job.

Tip 10: Bring work to do in quieter times

Occasionally, there are quiet times! The practice may have a ‘lull’ in the middle of the day, or you might see farm practice in the calmer summer months. It’s good to show some initiative and ask if there is anything you can help with if you find a quiet period, but if the answer is a genuine ‘no’, then having some revision or university work with you can be a good use of your time.

You’re partway through your degree and have survived pre-clinical EMS. Clinical EMS is even more exciting, as you’ll see all your learning coming together, get your scrubs on, and feel that step closer to becoming a vet. When you make the most of your EMS placements, they will be of great value……so jump in. You’ve got this!