Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick welcoming you to another episode of that chat. I'm sitting in a hotel room in London because I'm gonna be at a sustainability summit later on today, but. Really, really pleased and honoured to have Philippa Bernardino on the line with me.
Philippa is a vet at the University of Porto, but is also the owner and founder of a really interesting company that we'll talk a little bit more about later called Vet Expertise. But first of all, Philippa, welcome, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the er podcast. Well, Anthony, thank you.
It's, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see you again. And I'm looking forward for our chat.
Oh good, well, Philippa, just for the benefit of of those people who perhaps don't know you, tell us a little bit about your history. Obviously we know you're a veterinary surgeon, born and brought up in in Portugal, but went to super super city Porto to actually do the degree. As I was saying to you earlier, I remember visiting there many years ago and just finding it a very beautiful city and very similar to my own city, it's a port like Liverpool is.
We have Liverpool on one side of the river, we have Birkenhead on the other side of the Mersey. You have the Doro, you have Porto and Villanova de Gala. We, we're fortunate, we live in beautiful places, don't we?
Yes, we definitely live in amazing places and I was very lucky to graduate in the University of Porto and to live there for 5 for 6 years. So I was very fortunate and after my graduation, I still, I stayed in Portugal for 2 years, more or less. I did.
First opinion practises. Then I decided I want something more, so I moved to Germany without speaking German, so I decided to go and to do my internship at the LMU in Munich in surgery. I stayed there one more year after the internship, just, doing surgery, orthopaedics, neurology, teaching, and then I moved to the neurology department and I start my PhD there.
It was a challenge, but yeah, it was amazing. And then I returned to Portugal, so to the roots. We always want to go back to the roots and to this amazing country.
So here I start doing referral also, always in orthopaedics, neurology, and then I start teaching at the university. First, I teach veterinary nursing. And for the last, I think 3 years, I'm teaching at the Port University in the veterinary medicine master's degree, so which is great.
I really love teaching and it, it gives us an amazing opportunity to share a little bit of us with the new generations. It's so important to pass that information on, isn't it? And obviously teaching but also still doing some surgery and some clinical cases as well.
Yeah, always. I still do some clinical cases, in neurology and orthopaedics. Surgery I'm not doing anymore.
It was an option of me to stop doing surgery, but, I really love teaching and what I always say to my students is. What I teach is in the books, so I'm not teaching nothing new. I'm just making a, a, a resume of the best, but then I can share with them my, my life experience, my, my job experience, and I think this is what it's more valuable for them actually.
Yeah, I think you're very clever doing neurology. I was . Listening, I'm very blessed obviously with Webinar vet to be able to go to so many lectures and learning more about neurology, and I also remember one of my colleagues, bosses very early in my career, a guy called Ian Barclay, and I was looking in when he was doing some spinal surgery, and he said, yeah, I don't know why people refer these cases because they're so straightforward, but they're only straightforward if you're an expert, so I, I thought, well.
I'm definitely not gonna start messing around. I did the simple option of doing the skin, so I did dermatology instead. OK, that that's the area I really don't like.
We all, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, don't we? Exactly the dermatology is really my, my biggest weakness is dermatology. Fantastic.
So it's really interesting because it it it sounds very much like Porto is also a very forward thinking university because obviously you work there, you're still working there, you know, you're teaching the master of course as you said, but very innovative because obviously you, you were talking to me before about better expertise and how that came about. And it was very much in that sort of thinking around. We have a veterinary profession that is under stress.
How can we use tools and digital tools to lighten that load? And vet expertise were born from that of mental health issues, how can we lighten the load, and then using experts to help vets in practise to just take that load off them a bit by so so maybe explain again a little bit more about that story to people. Yeah, so when we created vet expertise, so the idea of vet expertise appeared in 2019, so before the pandemic, and it was really the, the mental health issues we started to see in the veterinary community, so we felt.
We need to do something. We need to help the colleagues, and what we, we couldn't solve the problem at all, but we said, OK, let's give them a tool that at least removes the burden of these complex clinical cases because like you said, you are amazing in dermatology. I'm, I'm good in neurology, but I don't know anything about for internal medicine, dermatology, or even the other areas, so, and we cannot know everything, so we decided to create a network of experts with vet expertise, so we create our platform so that the vets can go and just send us the.
Clinical case they are not able to solve or sometimes they don't have the time to solve it because we know that in practise you work so many hours you are completely overloaded and then at the end of the day, a 12 hour shift you need to spend 1 hour studying, OK, so this is not viable. So and that's why the mental health issues, this is one of the The main causes for the compassion fatigue, for the burnout we are seeing in our job is really the workload. So we found it here that we can do something to make a difference and also teaching at university, I see that the younger vets, they are completely overloaded also more than the experienced one because we know how it is we.
Finished university, we go to the field and we know sometimes how to work the cases, of course, but we don't know how to get a diagnosis, how we can treat them so vet expertise comes here as a, as a really huge help, and so then we, we also say, OK, technology is the future we know that, so we know technology is evolving, like we were saying, veterinary medicine is still very conservative, so. But we need to work that. So we created then the telemedicine app so that we give the vets their clinics, a tool that belongs to them.
It's in on the, on their website, and then they can start doing telemedicine with the pet parents, and we found it a dream job if we can do 2 days at work, 2 days at home doing telemedicine, and 3 days at the clinic doing just. Practical cases. So this is how we saw that technology can really, really, really be a very important tool for the mental health issues.
Yeah, I think the technology and innovation is, is so important for us as a profession, you know what I. Start a webinar about 14 years ago yesterday and the reason I did it, obviously I was looking outside the profession, so I think it's important that if we just look within inside the profession, we're conservative and we navel gaze, then we won't find the good ideas that are outside. Of course we don't need to reinvent the wheel, the wheel is already out there, we just need to bring it into the veterinary profession.
And for me, the big difficulty was. You know, it would cost thousands and thousands of pounds to do your training. It cost, a lot of time, so the, the, one of the ways was you went away for 2 or 3 days to a conference.
But actually one of the common ways then was you finished the evening surgery and you jumped in your car and you drove to another town 2030 miles away. Did an hour of CPD. You spent a bit of time with your friends, you maybe had a, a curled up chicken sandwich from the sponsors.
And then you got home and 1 hour had taken 5 hours and so. By digitalizing learning, we were able to democratise it, make it cheaper, make it accessible and affordable to vets all over the world, and of course vets who are in countries that perhaps don't have the level of education that we have in Europe, . If they can become better vets, we know that animal welfare will hopefully improve as well.
So with that in mind, I, I spent a lot of time talking to vets and saying, unless you become a digital business. You won't survive long term and of course this was pre-pandemic and then the pandemic came. And of course those people who had no digital expertise really, really struggled and in fact some businesses didn't survive.
So you know, whether you were a vet, a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. Nowadays, everybody has a digital component to their business, don't they? Yes, definitely, definitely, and it's it's really bad, so.
I do believe that vets are now afraid of the new technology, so they are resisting to it, but I do believe that the vets that won't make technology a part of the daily clinics, they won't make it. OK, they won't make it in the future. And because pet parents want technology because we know that the new generation, the millennials, they want technology.
They don't, they just don't want to go every time they need the clinic, they don't want that. And like you said, time, time is, the most precious thing we have in life. So why should I go and drive one hour to the vet, be there waiting at the, the waiting room.
Half an hour for the consultation, then drive back home and my pet is maybe stressed at the waiting room. He stressed at the appointment room. So the pet parents want to have this, this option.
They want to have telemedicine. They want to be able to talk online with their, with their vets. So this is something that the vets, vets also need to, to understand it, and If the pet parent really needs to go to the clinic, if the vet has a doubt, if the vet finds that he needs to see the pet personally, so he will say to the owner, please come to the clinic and I will see it.
And another very important point you, you said it with the webinar that when you create it's the, the access to high quality veterinary medicine to all the pets around the world. So it does matter if you are. In a real small village, I don't know, in Africa or in the, the most far apart corner in the world, you can have access to experts, you can have access to the best clinical advice that otherwise you wouldn't have.
You just, you are just there without support and what we see also in our job is. The isolation because when you think about veterinary medicine, we think about big cities Liverpool, London, Lisbon, Porto, where I don't know, every 5 kilometres you have a veterinary clinic, but a lot of vets were completely isolated. They are the only clinic in the, in the, in the, I know 100 kilometres apart so.
We, the, the goal is with these new technologies is to offer the best veterinary care to the animals. And best care for the, the veterinarian clinics for the veterinary surgeon and also to, to make the work-life balance much better because that's what vets don't have. We don't have work-life balance, right?
We, we cannot, if we do a clinical practise, it's very hard to have a balance in our life. Something, something we miss something. I think the triage is really important because, you know, if, I obviously speak to vets at conferences, ring them up and so on and and.
Now the comment is, you know, 1012, 14 years ago, it might have been, well, there's not enough online education that, you know, it's really difficult to do our education. Of course now there's tonnes of online education of varying qualities. But actually when I ring people up, they say we're incredibly busy, we're a 5 vet practise and we have 3 vets.
Now we obviously have a recruitment arm called Simply Vets, but actually trying to find vets and nurses to fill those positions is incredibly difficult. So therefore, the question then has to be how do we run a 5 vet practise that was an old 5 vet practise traditionally. Can we run it by using digital tools, by empowering our ears as perhaps as a 3 vet practise, which will then therefore run much more efficiently .
Probably with better profit, but we don't want people to be burnt out, so therefore we must take some of the roles away from the old vets, because the new vet, the vet of the 21st century is. Is different from the one from 2030 years ago. Yeah, yeah, it's, they are very different.
It doesn't mean, I never say better or worse, I don't think that that exists. They are just different and they are with 20 years. We would work 1214 hours a day and it will be fine for us.
We all start working like that, but nowadays they, they are much more aware of this quality of life, of what they need, so. They won't do what we did 20 years ago, so we need technology to, to bring this new vets to the practises, to, to bring them in, so to say, OK, we can make this much more efficient, and technology is there for, for this, and you, it's, you said something very important and I think vets are not aware that the new technologies will increase the economic profit of the clinics. Because like we spoke before, you, we are doing telemedicine since we start working by telephone, right?
We are advising, we are saying, and we are not charging for it. We never charge for a phone call and with these new tools for telemedicine, we can charge for it because we do an online consultation. For instance, our, our an app for telemedicine, it has already a payment system included, so we don't have even the discomfort of asking the pet parent to pay.
So if they schedule a meeting with us, an online appointment, they pay and they book the, the appointment. So, And this is a very efficient way of having a, a new economic return. So it's efficient because we can, it's much faster to do online in 30 minute consultation and then we move to the next one.
So, the time consuming for each consultation is less. We, we don't lose that much time because, you know how it is in the practise. Oh hi, So now, I will see you next week and you always chat and you chat with the person in the waiting room, so.
You know, you do all the social parts, so you lose a lot of time. So online, the time is much more efficient for each consultation. So and the new generations, they need this, they need this so they don't feel overwhelmed with the practise.
I think they are overwhelmed with, with the, with the veterinary practise because it is overwhelming and we were just different, but Maybe they are, they are right. I think they are right because we do need to have a work-life balance. We need to have time for family, for friends, for hobbies, and for work, we need to have all of that in our lives.
Yeah, no, I think it's, it's definitely a generational thing. And I think also just the way we learn, you know, when I was at university and then going as a young vet, you know, if you had a difficult case in the evening or in the practise in the spare time, you'd go to Bonneura or to Mullairk and Scott or to Slatters or whichever was the relevant book. And then you had to peel away all through it and find out the relevant bits, whereas now we take our phones and you know, there are so many apps that can help us with that and.
Of course information has double, tripled, quadrupled, you know, over that time, so it's impossible for vets to learn everything, so even the course, the way that the course is set up has to be different now because it's more about understanding the basics, finding out, you know, where can you go for the information. You know, we used to have to go sometimes drive in a bus to a library to find a book. Take it out, look at the pages, you know, I'm doing this because people who are in their twenties may not remember those times, but you know that that was what they had to do.
And of course we were very book orientated whereas the present generation is very. You know, phone and video, yes, yeah, you, you are definitely right, and they, they need quick information. They are used to have everything is quick, quick access, quick, but the problem is what I, what I see on the internet, if they go to internet, you have so much information that they don't know.
Which information it's, you know, should I use? Is this the best one? Is this the worst one?
So, and if you ask them, so read the paper, read an article, they don't have time for that. They, they, they don't, they don't do it because they will lose one hour reading the paper and then at the end that is this really what I should do to the animal. So I think what you said, it's like we guide them to work the clinical cases.
So we say how you can work a neurological case, a dermatology case, and then the vet expertise comes, OK, you work the case, so just give us the case and we will tell you what the diagnosis is, what the treatment is. What are the next steps you have to do because sometimes we need the vets to do more ultrasound or an X-ray so we guide them and this is the main thing I think they need guidance in the most in a very efficient way that we were not used to that. We were like you said, I remember going to the library and just Picking the books and making copies of the chapter just to read it and to see if they are, I have still a lot of books because of course if you want information I was buying all the time books they were so expensive, right?
We were spending so much money in books, but nowadays they prefer to do the webinars because they The webinars are great because it's practical, so they teach them how to do in practise, which is very different from the books. And, and teleconsultation is great because we work the case for them and like we were saying, teleconsultation is also a great tool for the e-learning because the next time they have a similar case, they will know how to solve it. They will learn it so they don't need to send the case again to vet expertise.
Yeah the vet goes up on the nurse all the time and they learn. With the best to learn with the, with the, the best experts in veterinary medicine because we only work with board certified European or American specialists so they learn with the best, with the most updated vets we have. So this is what great about tele consultation.
Philippa to sort of finish up, I mean, obviously you speak impeccably beautiful English and of course the scientific language is English, but What about the situation when obviously somebody is in another country. I know that obviously you're in Portugal and I know that vet expertise is used by vets in Portugal and also Brazil, which is obviously also speaking Portuguese. But if you've got Portuguese speakers, English speakers, but there are people in, let's say, China or in Africa, who don't speak very good English, how do you get around trying to communicate cases to them?
That that's a really great question, Anthony, and this was one of the challenges we had when we found vet expertise because the idea was I want to make information accessible to everybody and the, the reality is a lot of vets don't speak fluent English, so we needed to, to make a way that we can communicate. So what we did, we have a translator in the platform. With, with our experience, it works perfect.
It doesn't make a, a 100% perfect translation, but the main information, important information with our experience is not lost. So which means if you are in China, if you are in South America, if you are in Africa, it doesn't matter which language you want to, you speak, you can send us the case. In that language, and the vet answers you in English and you will receive the answer in your own language.
So this is the beauty in vet expertise. So we made the information accessible to every vet. So, and besides that, also thinking that Even the language is a problem, and also the sometimes the expertise, some vets don't know how to do neurological examination because they don't remember anymore from college and because they don't like neurology.
So we also provide in the platform tutorial videos to, to show them how to do it so they can learn it, so they can improve it. So the point of teleconsultation is really Helping and providing them education so they can always improve every time they submit a case with us, they learn and next time they will be much better. Every time they do, they become better and better and they will learn and learn.
This is the goal and we cannot have a language barrier if we want to go worldwide and if we want to go to every corner in the world and to every pet in the world. So, This was the way we found it and we are really happy because it's working perfectly with the with the translator. And it's, I think it's part of both of our visions, you know, to have the world's most confident vets.
I know from a GP's perspective with webinar vet that if you can go on a webinar and you learn one thing that you can take into your clinical practise, then if you do that. One time a week, at the end of the year you've learned so much more and so being a lifelong learner, I think it's so important that actually it makes the job more fun. I know we're we're talking about overwhelm, but I think we also, I want to finish it in a hopeful note.
Actually it's a fabulous job, it's one of the best jobs in the world. And what we've found in our experience is if people embrace learning, it actually keeps them. More confident about the job, they go into the consulting room with a fair idea of what's going on and, you know, with a good chance of being able to solve that case.
So learning actually makes it less likely that you're probably going to burn out in the first place. Yeah, I 100% agree with you because I think learning is important for you to, to grow as a vet. And also for you not to be afraid to say when you don't know.
This is also something very important that vets need to, need to learn. So when we realise, like, I don't know, it's fine that I don't know because I have experts that I can learn with and the burden is off and like you said, the self-esteem, our self-esteem improves every time we learn something better. And if our self-esteem is high, we won't have a burnout, we won't have a compassion fatigue, and you are so right.
This job is the best job in the world, so being a vet is definitely one of the most beautiful things, at least in my life. So, I'm really, really, really, I, I feel blessed and grateful for having this job, but I do think we have to make the profession lighter. And lighter goes with learning, lighter goes with, OK, I don't know how to solve it.
I'm, I don't feel embarrassed or or ashamed that I don't know how to solve it. I will look for help and it's fine, it's perfect because you know, with experience, I, I do a lot of consult. I do only neurology and orthopaedics with the, with the pet parents and sometimes they say, oh he has a Skin problem here and I'm really 100% comfortable saying this is not my area.
I have no idea what it has there. I will send you to my colleague that is doing dermatology, you know, so this type of confidence also help us making the job lighter and easier and enjoying being a vet because at the end we need to enjoy to be a vet. I think it's also getting over that hump of the first couple of years where everything seems bewildering, but actually as you get older, you realise that you don't understand everything and, and my favourite, one of my favourite quotes of the last 14 years with webinars was a, Mike Willard, who's a very famous American gastroenterologist and a brilliant lecturer and teacher.
And in his lovely text and drawl, he said, everything I taught you 10 years ago was a lie. I just didn't realise. So that's so amazing, but you know, just a really confident person can, you know, say that and.
And that's what we learn. We learn that with time it gets better and it gets lighter, but we need to, to help them. We need to help them.
We need to show them. We need to guide them, and this is why I think vet expertise, the webinars, with the webinar vets, this is so important for, for vets because they need this. They really need this to make their life better.
Philippa, we could talk all day and all night. We would at least need a a half bottle, if not a full bottle of wine, and it's perhaps too early in the in the day to be doing that. It's coming up to 12 o'clock.
I don't, well, you're in Portugal, so it's 12 o'clock with you as well, isn't it? Yeah, so we could start with some 1, we can start 12 o'clock is OK. Thank you so much for you know, agreeing to come on and it's inspirational people like you that keep me going as well, so thanks for being an inspiration.
Oh, thank you, thank you so much, and it was a huge pleasure to be here and thank you for this opportunity and I always love to chat with you. And good luck with obviously the university and also vet expertise, it sounds amazing. And looking forward to hearing how it progresses over the months and years ahead.
Thank you, thank you very much, thank you. Thanks everyone for listening, this is Anthony Chadwick, this is er another episode of Vet Chat, the UK's number one veterinary podcast. Look forward to seeing you on another one or a webinar very soon.
Take care.
