Even better yet

September 19, 2022

Roshan McGuinness, AVC 2023, travelled to Port Hope Simpson as one of the student participants on the Chinook Project. As part of the experience, the students craft various pieces of reflective writing.

For this clinical rotation: The Chinook Project, I and four other students (Ray, Phoebe, Lindsey, and Christine) were selected to travel to Port Hope Simpson, Labrador with two veterinarians (John & Alan) and a veterinary technician (Melissa) to provide veterinary services to a community that does not have year-round access to veterinary care – their nearest veterinarian is over five hours away.

Roshan in surgery

Our trip consisted of five clinic days plus four days of travel. Clinics included both medicine and surgical appointments. Each student would take turns doing medicine appointments (checkups, vaccines, deworming), surgical appointments (spays and neuters mostly), or doing anesthesia for the surgeries.

For the first couple days, the students often shared patient duties, but as the days progressed, we became a lot more self-sufficient and would often work-up our surgical patients from start to finish. This meant we would do our physical exam, calculate their drugs, pre-medicate, place intravenous catheters, induce anesthesia, and intubate our own patients with the help of one of the vets or Melissa, and then get scrubbed and go right into surgery.

Going into this experience, I think we were all eager to improve our surgical skills, as well as increase our comfort in dealing with clients and in handling anesthesia. I think we all accomplished that goal without a doubt.

Although this was my third clinical rotation, it was my first that involved dealing directly with clients, so I was nervous about possibly saying the wrong thing, or not knowing what to say. Unfortunately, the community was dealing with a COVID outbreak prior to our arrival which meant that we could not have clients inside the clinic. We were still able to talk with clients outside the clinic when we were meeting them for their appointments and at discharge, but I think the distanced nature of our service didn’t allow us to hone our client communication skills as much as we would have liked.

I was most nervous about the anesthesia aspect of this rotation, as I find anesthesia can be terrifying. It was also where I felt like my skills were lacking the most. We were also told there might be instances where we would be doing anesthesia on two patients at once which really scared me. In the end, that didn’t end up happening, but I was able to do anesthesia more than I had anticipated, and I feel really good about how my skills have improved in that aspect. On the first day we noticed we weren’t achieving adequate levels of sedation with our dexmedetomidine (a type of anesthetic drug), so we started using different anesthetic drug protocols, many of which were new to me – for example, acepromazine and hydromorphone for premedication, or ketamine and midazolam for induction. It was rewarding to learn different ways to achieve sedation and anesthesia than what we were initially comfortable with.

The team setting up the clinic in PHS

All in all, this rotation was a complete success, due in large part to how well our group worked together. There was never even a moment of tension between any of us; we all had a common goal of working together to serve this community, and we did so while still having fun. Every day after clinics were done, we had a “debrief” where we talked about what went well from the day, and what could have been even better yet. I think this was a valuable part of our day and allowed us to focus on areas where we personally wanted to improve for the following days, while also highlighting ourselves and our team with areas we thought deserved kudos. 

As hoped, we were able to learn new surgical skills, gain practice in conducting medicine appointments, explore new anesthetic protocols, and work as a team. If I could do it all again – which I would in a heartbeat – I would like to see us having clients in the building (safely of course) and seeing how that would affect our clinic flow. While it would be amazing to go back to Port Hope Simpson since everyone there was so great to us, it would also be nice to visit another different community that is in need of veterinary care.