Senior Lecturer in Small Animal Surgery What is your current role at Easter Bush campus and what does a typical day look like? (obligatory question)I am a senior lecturer in small animal soft tissue surgery at the small animal hospital, and for me, no two days are alike! I am responsible for overseeing the undergraduates, interns and residents who look after our inpatients on the soft tissue surgery service, and I love the debate, ideas and discussions that each patient generates. Each patient is different, so we can be removing a tumour in the morning and reconstructing a wound in the afternoon. I’ve just got home from an emergency where a grass seed buried it’s way into a dog’s chest and I had to remove it, which was great. When I’m not on clinics, I love research and am investigating naturally occurring oral cancers in dogs, which are potentially draw great parallels with similar human cancers. How did you get to where you are today? (obligatory question)I graduated from Edinburgh and, after a period of time in first opinion practice, completed an internship and an ECVS residency, before working in a multidisciplinary hospital in Cambridgeshire where I did a part time PhD on cancer genetics. After this was completed, I moved back to Edinburgh!How did you land your current role? (obligatory question)I heard about the role and always wanted to return to Edinburgh, so applied and was fortunate enough to be appointed. Was there a time you messed up and felt like you’d failed? How did you bounce back? I severely messed up in general practice, where unbeknownst to me at the time, I made a surgical error whilst tying off a blood vessel during a bitch spay. The stitch failed a few hours later and she died as a result of my mistake, which was absolutely devastating for everyone. I can’t turn back time to correct my mistake but going forward, I do ensure I tell everyone this story, highlighting exactly where and how my mistake occurred to ensure that none of my students ever make the same mistake. Despite your best efforts as a surgeon, you will make mistakes. The best thing you can do is share what happened, which will stick securely to the minds of others when they perform the same procedure in future. What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned and how has it proven invaluable? Personally, I’ve learned lots from becoming a parent, which has forced me to address some of my weaknesses, particularly impatience. I learned that my impatience doesn’t serve to facilitate speed, growth or learning in the other person, which has helped me develop methods of teaching more constructively. Professionally, I’ve had a period of time where I was micro-managed, which was extremely stifling and did not encourage productive work. This period was invaluable because I now genuinely understand that giving people sufficient room to think, create and (where safe to do so) make mistakes obtains the very best performance possible from everyone in the team. Through this, I’ve learned that, despite what you might think of yourself as a leader, you don’t always know best and others can often do a job as well or better than you, given the opportunity. This article was published on 2024-09-02
